The first version of this poem, ten lines without stanzas, is handwritten with strong black strokes made with a black felt-tip pen and dated "17/1/94" (17 January 94).  Chedid once remarked to me that she preferred the bold strokes produced by writing with a black felt-tip pen.  By way of explanation, she recalled her penmanship classes at boarding school, and how she dreaded being forced to write with an ink pen that created thin lines. 
            The main feature about the structure of the first version of this poem, is its brevity or compression.  Compression abbreviates language resulting in ambiguity which in turn, leads to multiplicity of meaning in a poem.  Through these ambiguities that appear as "gaps in meaning," differences between the language of poetry and prose become apparent.  Chedid uses this kind of compression or parataxis to mimic "spoken language," which tends to be disjunctive and to rely on sentence fragments.  Successive short sentences or nominal phrases increase the movement in a poem (to read more about what I call Chedid's "visual rhythm" and specific information on Chedid's works of poetry please see my dissertation:  "The Persistence of Vision in Andrée Chedid's Poetry," Washington University, 2000) and this juxtaposition of words further increases multiplicity of meaning.