On buying a book of poems by
a modern French poet by John Daniel

I treasure the incomprehensibility of language
the impossibility of understanding the old men in the café.
Talk in the air like fluttering birds.

Ces pages, pistes de decollage
ou de decodage ne suffisent pas.
Les signes me manquent.

I don’t want to learn the language of menus,
timetables and ski-lifts.
I prefer the puzzle of poems,

your odd drawings of  houses
I half-recognise as my own.
I shall never decipher you fully.

We share the shade like fish
under the leaves in the river
seeking the shadows of our small, unnameable lives.