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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.