330

The trees move restlessly
In the bright space beyond
The windowframe. Stark

Noon light spreads from
A broken bank of cloud,
The half-light below its

Dark lower edge moves in
A faint grey haze of rain,
Out past the houses, out

Past the shoreline's arc.
A kinglet drops into the
Frame, swaying upon a

Forked twig. Its olive
Body is lit at its edge by
Two yellow, chevroned

Wings. Poppyseed eyes
Glimmer before its bill—
A tiny, blunted cone.

At the center of its dull
Crown, a lick as of red
Emulsion. All its body

Crowds to this point,
Slight nation hinged
About its glowing capital.

329

Cosmo, where is your first cigarette?
Ah yes! Trailing smoke out from behind
Your wrist, over your clean cuff, the dark
Outline of your suit jacket. Walk into the
Glare of the stagelights, hang it in a dim
Recess of the club, come forth slowly, sit.
Be at ease in your shirtsleeves, let your
Cigarette mature where you crook it in
Your right hand. Ash at the tip that seems
About to fall—brush it at the lip of glass.
It is morning, there are hours yet, it will
All wait. Allow the chords of the piano
And the frail voice. You are gentle with
Yourself. The curtains will part, she will
Come through, she will move before you
As borne upon a current of the air. Cheap
Veils and too much mascara. Allow her
Tenderness for now. This is but your first 
Cigarette. Later for the first glass. Allow
That the light should fail before you first.

328

The maples at the back of the house
Are flowering, weightless green flowers,
Green of a new wheatear : light colour
That the silent air seems to lift before it.

The sun beams in through the new leaves
And the loose flowerheads, a presence
Without presence, a substance of song.
The dark of the tree falls away from them,

Black veinlike joists grafted to thicker
Vessels, thick tangents. The branches are
As tributaries joining to a greater course.
Below the soil, the roots form a vast delta.

White sediment of cloud drifts in the far
Distance, as borne on the slow stream.
It would seem to break at each instant,
And its particles flow out across a falls.

In the shade of the tree a white birdhouse,
Small, with a green roof. A bird passes
The aperture—holds still. It is a presence
Without presence. It passes from itself.

327

Rimbaud : LES ASSIS

Black with pustules, pockmarked, their eyes bound
By green rings, rheumatic fingers clenched at their
Femurs, vague hargnosities plating their sinciputs
Like the leprous flowerings of old walls—

In epileptic love, they have grafted their
Fantastical ossatures to the great black skeletons
Of their chairs. Through the morning and the night
They interlace their feet in the rachitic spindles.

These dotards have been joined to their seats
Forever. They feel their skin desiccate in the light,
Or, eyes to the window and the fading clouds,
Tremble the pained trembling of toads.

The seats are gentle to them : a seasoned
Brown, the wicker yields to their protruding girth.
The soul of old sunlight glows there, caught
In tresses of corn, a bright ferment of grain.

These sedents, grey pianists, hunch awkwardly,
Tapping their fingers as with a rumour of drums.
They listen to the swell of their sad barcarolles,
Their dull heads jerking in passionate abandon.

Do not ask them to stand! That is catastrophe.
They rise up, caterwauling like struck cats,
Slowly spreading their scapulae, O rage!
Their trousers billow about their swollen waists.

You hear them striking their bald skulls
Against the sombre walls, the clap of their bent
Feet fading. Their coat buttons, like bright pupils,
Flash out of the obscurity of far corridors.

And then they have an invisible, deadly weapon :
Returning, their regards secrete a black venom,
As that which brims in a bitch's punished eye,
And you sweat, as if caught in some dark orifice.

Reseated, their fists vanish into dirty sleeves :
They think on who had made them stand,
Their grapelike tonsils palpitating in the aurora
Of the evening light, seeming at their last breath.

When an austere sleep brings down their eyelids,
They lay on their arms, dreaming of fecund seats,
Of sweet little darlings, chairs in fine brocade
With which their proud bureaus might be adorned :

In each of their low inkwells, spores of inkflowers
Propagate like commas, soothing them in sleep,
A row of gladioli before a flight of dragonflies—
Their members agitate against the barbed wicker.

326

Rimbaud : LE DORMEUR DU VAL

In a verdant aperture a river sings,
Hanging senselessly from the grass
In silver rags. The sun lights upon the
Proud mountainside in cascading waves.

A young soldier sleeps : his mouth is open,
His head bare, his nape sunk in fresh, blue
Watercress. He is laid out under the sky, 
Pale in his green bed where the light falls.

He sleeps, his feet in the gladioli. Smiling
Like an invalid child, he rests his eyes.
Nature, cradle him warmly : he is cold.

No perfume will make his nostril quiver.
He sleeps, a hand on his motionless breast.
There are two red openings in his right side.

325

Rimbaud : OPHÉLIE I

On calm, black water, where the stars sleep,
Pale Ophelia floats like a great lily,
Floats almost motionless, bound in her long veils.
From the far woods, calls sound.

For more than a thousand years, Ophelia
Passes, a white phantom, on the long, dark stream ;
For more than a thousand years, her sweet folly
Murmurs its romance to the evening breeze.

The wind kisses her breasts, giving out in corollae
Vast curtains that are shaped softly by the waters ;
Trembling willows weep over her shoulders, and
The reeds incline over her broad, dreaming brow.

Crumpled waterlilies sigh around her ;
Sometimes, in a sleepy inlet, she disturbs a nest,
From which a shivering of slight wings escapes :
An obscure music falls from the golden stars—

324

Rimbaud : RAGES DE CÉSARS

The pale man walks by the flowering lawn,
Dressed in black, a cigar between his teeth :
He quietly recalls the flowers of Tuileries
And at times a fire seems to light his dull eye.

For the Emperor is drunk from twenty years
Of orgy. He had said to himself : I will blow
Out liberty delicately, as I would a candle.
He recalls his freedom now! He feels spent.


He is caught.—What name trembles on his
Mute lips? What implacable regret harrows
Him? We cannot know. His eye is lifeless.

He thinks perhaps of his spectacled Compère.
He watches his smouldering cigar send up, as
On evenings at Saint-Cloud, a fine blue plume.

323

Rimbaud : VÉNUS ANADYOMÈNE

A woman's head, the heavy pomade in its
Brown hair failing to hide its alopecia,
Rises slowly and senselessly from the
Green coffin of an old zinc bathtub ;

Then the grey, bloated neck, the great salient
Shoulder-blades ; the back, which undulates
Down to a long curvature about the kidneys ;
The fat under the skin seeming to form flat sheets ;

The spine is a little red, and it all gives off
A disturbing odour ; often, one notices
Singularities one might examine under a glass—

Two words carved in the lower back : CLARA VENUS ;
The whole body shifts and tends its large rump,
Where it is beautified hideously by an anal fissure.

319

Two robins move discreetly
    Inside the midday shadow
Of a telegraph pole.
   They approach each other,
Sidelong, across the tarmac,

Angling their eyes quietly
   From one side to the other,
Hunching in their
   Black and orange and grey
Feathers, never venturing

Outside of the shadow of the
   Pole's great round trunk
Into the cool light
   Of noon. Across the road,
Daffodils nod in their beds.

As if at some sign, they fly
   Into the immediate air,
Orbiting as binary,
  Dancing furiously about
In the fire of their wings,

That are as substantial
   Only as the cool air itself.
Their love is violent
   As their violence is loving :
They are held in centrifuge.

They fall and seem to tend,
   Silently, before their own
Accomplishment,
   Or before some broader
Power that had moved them.