Source document: https://docs-lawep.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/1697646200759.pdf (Canada)
Tightrope Translated by Nigel Spencer ------------------------------------------------- A day after the Christmas celebration, I was still feeling the effects of all this shared joy.

On the way back to Montreal, I also travelled back to my childhood.
Between lines of her exercise book, a strange acrobat walks the tightrope an aged child suspended on the thread of wrinkled young dreams In her carnival world deep inside her ferrous thread leads to fairy worlds, real and fantastic, bursting in firework colours beneath her eyes beneath her feet cautiously placed, first one, then the next, so as not to fall her busy hands juggling sounds and words and impressions, leaves and flakes, music and illusions, out-manoeuvring the seasons to draw eternity in sweet delirium of feelings haunted by indescribable beauty Her pencil a cane to lean on in old age .
youth’s walking stick too, her hand plunges into the sky to scribble fresh stories amid the stars and lighten her nights of torment Her eyes alight, fixed on the here and the elsewhere and her voice bursts into a roar of laughter She knows where she’s headed She’s known since she was five, walking along the second-floor handrail reaching for her other self, sweet craziness in this unplumbed risk this dangerous balance and necessary control to keep from tumbling into childhood death Drawn by mysteries at any time she could catapult and fall to the underside of the world, the flipside of everything where the invisible is born, the other side of heaven far behind the clouds heavy as eyelids that enclose her characters in troubled sleep, characters walled up between parentheses in her words or crossed out as she goes along or shredded in a thousand bits of paper falling in a snow of silence on her life to submit her to winter and cold Then one day perhaps after hearing her many appeals, those who breathe behind the clouds set her characters free, and they started to dance in the clearing of her life, for it was their turn to juggle with the meaning of her days She knew who they were by their exaltation For so long they held the fictive wire for her to creep along a thread of dreamweaving a ferrous thread of fairy worlds a febrile thread like a tightrope walker’s a feverish thread like a sleepwalker’s filament of sound thin and tenuous as a lifeline in the hands of a gypsy enthralled by the unforeseeable circus of existence