There’s a troupe of strolling players and their motley brood
glimpsed on the road through the trees at the edge of the wood.
And then, when you’re hungry and thirsty, there’s always
somebody to chase you away.
5
I am the saint at prayer on the terrace skyline
like the beasts which graze down to the sea of Palestine.
I am the scholar in the armchair in the dark eyrie.
Rain and branches beat against the casements of the library.
I am the wanderer of the high road through
the blasted dwarfish woods; the roar of sluices
deafens my footsteps. For a long time I sit stunned
by the melancholy gold laundry of the setting sun.
I might well be the child abandoned on the pier
floating out to the high seas, the little muleteer
following the mountain track which climbs to the sky.
The paths are rough, hillocks spiked with gorse nearby.
How still the air! How far away the springs and birds!
This must be the end of the world. Ever onwards upwards.
6
When the bit comes to the bit, let them rent
me this tomb covered in bumpy whitewashed cement,
deep down in the earth. I lean my elbow on
the desk. I read by lamplight, fool enough to con
these boring books again. Enormously remote
above my subterranean salon, houses send down roots,
fogs gather. The muck is red or black. Monstrous
city, endless night! Not so far above, the noxious
sewers. Their walls the very thickness of the globe.
Chasms of azure, walls of fire? I send a probe
into these levels, maybe to discover this is where
moons encounter comets, and pterodactyls whirr.
In hours of bitterness I imagine spheres of sapphire
and of metal. I am master of silence. I hear no choir.
Why then, for all the cynicism that I vaunt,
should the ghost of a vent pale in the corner of my vault?
What Goes Round (Ornières)
To the right, the summer dawn awakes the leaves,
the mists, the noises of the park, and pales the palings’ sheaves.
And the slopes to the left hold in their violet shadows
the thousand quickening ruts of the dewy road.
Fairytale procession! Wagons loaded with animals
of gilded wood, rainbow-hued poles and awnings and panels,
all drawn by twenty galloping dappled circus horses, men
and children bouncing on marvellous animals — twice times ten
vehicles bedecked with flowers, ornate as coaches from a fairy tale,
brimming with children dressed up for a suburban pastoral —
coffins under ebon canopies each swaying their pair
of black plumes to the trot of huge blue and black mares.
Curtain Raiser (Parade)
Most sturdy rogues. Several of them have ripped you off.
Such little needs they have, no rush to take advantage of
you, knowing what they do about you. What mature men!
Eyes blank as the summer night, eyes of energumen,
red and black and tricoloured, steel studded with gold stars;
faces distorted, leaden, pale, aflame. Burlesque bazaar!
Cruel, gaudy swank and swagger. Some are young — how
would they regard Cherubino? — well endowed
with terrifying voices. A bunch of very dangerous clowns,
they’re sent to take it up the back way in the nearest town,
dressed to kill. O most brutal leering paradise
of smirk and sneer! Not to be compared with your prize
fakirs or your average buffoon. In furbelows and frills
like something from a bad dream, they dance quadrilles,
play romances, tragedies, villains, demi-gods and queens
in histories or religions that have never been.
Chinese, Hottentots, bohemians and nitwits,
Molochs, lizards of the lounge, hyenas, little squits,
they mix up clapped-out schticks with sleazy poses,
or the latest sketch; sing girly arias on tippy-toes.
Master jugglers, they transpose the fore to aft,
and cunningly deploy electrifying stagecraft.
Eyes blaze, rouge weeps, bones stretch, blood sings.
Whether travesty or terror, they aim to do their thing —
which lasts a minute or whole months on end.
And who’s behind this wild curtain raiser? I, my friend.
Cities (Villes)
The official acropolis exceeds the most
colossal modern barbarity, not to boast
of the dull light ever leaching from the grey sky,
the imperial glare of the buildings. Snow lies
all the year round. A singular enormity
of awful taste has reproduced by committee
the architectures of the Ancient World. I go
to shows of paintings whose quality is zero,
in premises the size of twenty Hampton Courts.
‘Simply not to be missed’, according to reports.
A Norwegian Nebuchadnezzar has constructed
the marble ministerial staircase as instructed;
even the lackeys, prouder than Brahmans, look down
their noses at you, and I tremble at the frown
of the colossal doormen, not to talk of foremen.
And can you find your way around? Ask the hackney-men —
they’ll go on all day about closed squares, cul-de-sacs,
security barriers. It fairly puts their backs
up, I can tell you. As for the parks, here you find
‘Primitive nature organized by high art’. Mind
you, it’s inexplicable, this part of the town:
a boatless arm of the sea shivers its sleet-blue gown
between quays decked out with giant candelabra.
‘Ministry of Works’: the usual palabra.
A little pontoon leads you to a postern gate
right under the dome of ‘Sainte-Chapelle’. It’s really great:
diameter of said dome, fifteen thousand feet.
Having said that, parts of it are still incomplete.
The brass footbridges offer certain points of view
from platforms and stairs from which I thought I’d see through
to the depths of the acropolis. Here’s the wonder
I could not discover: how a man might wander
on all the other levels above or below
the city. Where might they be found? Which way to go?
For the contemporary visitor, to check
his whereabouts would take at least an all-day trek.
The business district is a circus, uniformly styled,
extensive galleries and arcades undefiled
by shops, though the snow has been trampled on the roadside:
nabobs, rare as London Sunday morning walkers, stride
towards a diamond coach. Several divans of red velvet;
polar drinks are served, at prices variably elevated —
anything from eight hundred to eight thousand
rupees; more, if you happen to come from Iceland.
Are there theatres to be found in this zone of snow?
Maybe the boutiques put on the odd, small, sordid show.
And there must be a police force, though what strange laws
apply here are beyond me. It’s given me some pause,
trying to conceive of what adventurers venture here.
It must be said the suburb has an atmosphere
as elegant as a beautiful Paris street. Democrats
are but a hundred strong; the houses are detached:
the suburb peters out biz
arrely in the woods of what
they call ‘The County’. There are groves abounding in foxtrot,
immense plantations yielding all kinds of delight,
where untamed gentlemen hunt through the journals by night,
scanning for gossip or sport by the newly invented light.
Être Belle (Being beauteous)
Against a snow, a Being Beautiful of great size.
Death-whistles and circles of mute music give rise
to this adorable hulk, and make it get up
spectre-like to loom and quiver. Seen in close-up,
wounds of black and scarlet burst through the haughty flesh.
The colours of real life shimmer, flit and flash
about this apparition in the builder’s yard.
Shudders grumble thunder as — electric-charged
with spits and blips of deadly static that the world,
receding ever further like a marble swirled
in space behind us, hurls against our Mother
of Beauty — she backs off, straightens, and becomes another.
And oh! our bones are clothed anew with flesh and sex.
O ashen face, O hair escutcheon, what comes next?
The cannon against which I am saboteur
amid the clash of trees and weightless air.
The Twilight of History
(Soir historique)
In whatever evening the naïve tourist happens
to be, escaping from our economic horrors,
a master’s hand awakes the spinet of the meadows.
They’re playing cards in the depths of the pond; posed
in the mirror are cuties and queens; there are female
saints, veils, threads of harmony, legendary scales
of colour iridescent in the setting sun.
He shudders as hunt and horde rush by. A gun
sounds. Hullaballoo. Drama drips on the stage of grass.
Watch the ceiling people bang their heads against the glass!
To his captive vision, Germany scaffolds upwards
to the moon; Tatar deserts catch fire; blizzard
revolutions sweep Celestial China; detailed
by stairs and armchairs cut into the rock, a little world, pale
and flat — Africa the Occident — will come to pass.
Afterwards, the ballet of familiar seas and nights, worthless
chemistry and empty arias. The same small-town
bourgeois magic wherever the mail boat sets you down.
Even the most elementary physicist feels
it’s impossible to endure this egotistical zeal,
the mist of physical regret, which even to observe
is more than any sane tellurian deserves.
No! The moment of the boiler room, of rising seas,
of subterranean stirrings, of the planet seized
by conflagration, and the consequent exterminations,
certainties so blithely skimmed by Biblical interpretation,
by the Norms … we need serious people to see through it.
Though that’s hardly the stuff of legend, I admit.
The Point (Promontoire)
Golden dawn and shivering evening find our ship
riding just off this villa and its dependent townships
which comprise a promontory extensive as Epirus
or Greater Japan, Arabia and the Peloponnesus!
Shrines illuminated by returning embassies;
vast panoramas of the coastal cheveaux-de-frise;
dunes illustrious with sultry flowers and bacchanals;
levees of a sleazy Venice, and Carthaginian canals;
drowsy eruptions of Etnas, flowers and water in crevasses;
glaciers; wash-houses surrounded by German aspens;
slopes of magnificent parks; circular façades
of Grand Hotels in Brooklyn; while their railways, I should add,
go under, round, and overhang the premises,
selected from historical examples of naves and apses
from the most colossal architectural gazebos
culled from Asia, the Americas and Italy, whose windows,
lit by champagne, chandeliers and heady breezes, open
to the whim of travellers and nobles, welcome in
through daylight hours a host of coastal ritornellos,
not to mention the most artistic tarentellas,
all to decorate the grand façades of Promontory Palace.
High Society (Scènes)
The Ancient Theatre pursues its musical accords
A wooden pier extends the length of a stony field
where the uncouth wander under the naked trees.
In corridors of black gauze designed by troglodytes,
pursuing the promenaders under lantern-light
and leaves, bird actors swoop onto a pontoon
of masonry hitched to a flotilla of balloons
pitching and yawing amid the archipelago
of crowded jolly boats and pleasure-cruising bateaux.
Lyric scenes accompanied by drum and flute
look down from niches intricate and convolute
contrived upon the ceilings of a modern club
or hall of Orient, or renovated pub.
The Faery Spectacle manoeuvres on a summit
of the amphitheatre in a wooden thicket,
or sings and shimmies for the ignorami
in the shadow of the waving forest’s origami
which overhangs the ridge of cultivated fields.
On this our stage, the Opéra-Comique can be seen
between the gallery and footlights. What a scene.
Antic (Antique)
Elegant son of Pan! About your forehead crowned
with wild flowerets and berries, you move around
those precious orbs, your eyes. Stained with brown lees
of wine, your cheeks grow hollow. Your fangs gleam.
Your chest is a lyre, plucked strings shivering the blond hair
of your arms. Your heart pulses in the dark lair
of your belly. Where sleeps the double sex. Walk through the night
gently moving that thigh, that second thigh, that left leg …
Twenty Years A-Growing (Jeunesse)
I SUNDAY
Calculus put by, a fallen heaven I recall,
and memories sidle in to hold the house in thrall:
the old séance of rap and rhyme, of what goes on
inside the head, the spirit world, encephalon.
A horse careers off on the suburban racetrack
past ploughland, hazel groves, as if on switchback,
riddled with carbonic plague. Somewhere, who knows where,
a desperate drama queen laments her last affair —
improbable desertion. Desperadoes pine
for pandemonium and drunkenness and crime.
Along the rivers little children come and go
in straggling gangs, stifling what little curses they know.
Let us resume our studies to the rising clatter
of the workers, and the middle classes’ chatter.
2 SONNET
O man of common constitution, was not the flesh
a fruit hung in the orchard? You come back in a flash,
O childhood days! Squanderable treasure of the body.
Which to love, the peril or the power of Psyche?
The earth had hillsides blossoming with men of art
and power; and lineage and race inclined your heart
to crimes and mourning — the world your fortune
and your peril. But with that labour long since proven,
you, your calculations!, are no more than your dance
and voice, unfixed, unforced, though of a double consequence,
invention and achievement in agreement — reciprocal
despite the image-empty
universe — of that fraternal
and discreet humanity. Might and right
reflect that dance, that voice, only now appreciated.
3 TWENTY YEARS A-GROWING
The voices of instruction exiled … all gone sour,
that physical innocence lost hour after hour …
adagio. Ah, the infinite egoism
of adolescence, the studious optimism!
How full of flowers was the world that summer!