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Baudelaire : UNE CHAROGNE

Do you remember the object we saw, my love,
                That fine, soft morning of summer?
At a confluence of paths, a degenerate carrion
                Lay on a bed strewn with stones,

Its legs in the air like a lubricious woman,
                 Burning and sweating out toxins,
Displaying in a nonchalant and cynical manner
                Its stomach full of exhalations.

The sun beamed down upon its putrefaction
                 As if to cook it to a tenderness,
As if to uncouple all its mass, and render it up
                To nature that first joined it into one.

And heaven watched where the superb carcass
                Bloomed like a flower.
The miasma was so strong, you seemed close
                To falling unconscious on the grass.

Flies droned above the putrid abdomen
                Out of which came black battalions
Of larvae, flowing like a thick liquid
                Over an expanse of living rags.

It all rose and fell like a tide, or at times
                Bore up with a dark crackle ;
It seemed that the body, inflated by the vague
                Breath of these multiplications, lived.

And this little world gave out a strange music,
                Like to running water or the breeze,
Or to the rhythmic motion of grain
                That a winnower agitates and turns.

The forms effaced themselves and were no more
                Than a dream. A half-finished sketch
On a forgotten canvas, that the artist
                 May complete only through memory.

From behind the rocks a dog watched us
                With a baleful eye, raising its hackles,
Awaiting the moment that it could claim from
                The skeleton a morsel it had left.

You will one day be the semblance of this refuse,
                 Of this horrific infection,
Star of my eyes, heliocentre of my existence! You,
                My angel and my passion!

Yes! You will be such as this, O queen of grace.
                 After the last sacraments,
You will go beneath the soil and the flourishing
                 Grasses, to mould in your ossements.

Then, O my beauty! tell the vermin,
                 As they consume you with their kisses,
That I have kept the form and the divine essence
                 Of my decomposed love!