Never the Don Juan of uncaring haughty mettle,
Striding down the stairways where the hellfire splendours run,
Not the one who used to spray the Bible with his spittle,
Sneering as he quaffed with the Governor of stone.
Hearts are all untouched, for they’ve misread his pretty eyes,
Only in dreams has his mouth the taste of kisses,
Dreams that are dreamed in her sombre fantasies
By one, relentless, who ignores him and despises,
Buffets him with jewels of ice, with lips cadaver-cold,
Thrusting her unspeaking mouth against his mouth and eyes,
Her deadly sphinx’s eyes, her two hands’ feral hold
On his eyes and hands, on his star and on the skies.
Though his heart is brutalised by dead and monstrous creatures,
Though they pierce his passions with their rotting pointed snout,
For just a single manly kiss, you perishable sweethearts,
On the Last Day’s threshold he will save you, pluck you out.
Laughter on his lips will conjure strawberry crushes;
Purer is the destiny, the stamp his gaze proclaims.
His hands full of embers and his teeth full of ashes,
He’s the reborn Bacchus, who surges from the flames.
Yet, for each one born again, how many who, undying,
Round their hearts and ankles must wear a heavy chain.
Rivers will be flowing and the dead will be decaying…
Every year in springtime the oaks are green again.
I live when I choose in a dark ravine above which the sky is a jagged diamond cut up by the shade of the fir-trees, larches and rocks that cover the steep slopes.
In the grass of the ravine grow strange tuberous plants, columbine and meadow-saffron; above them circle praying mantises and dragonflies; insects give way to muskrats and melancholy crows. So unceasingly constant are sky, flora and fauna that some immutable season must have descended on this ever nocturnal ravine with its star-studded diamond-shaped canopy, not crossed by any cloud.
On the trunks of the trees two initials, always the same, are engraved. What knife put them there, held by what hand and with whom in mind?
The valley was deserted when I first came here. No-one had set foot in it before I did. No-one but myself has explored it.
The pond where frogs swim rhythmically in the shade reflects stars that never move, and the marsh, alive with the sad sonorous cries of toads, has a will-o’-the-wisp that is always the same.
The season of sad and stalled love hovers over this solitude.
I will always be in love with it and will surely never manage to pass the fringe of larches and fir-trees, to climb the contorted rocks so as to reach the white road where at certain times she passes. The road where shadows do not always point the same way. Sometimes it seems to me that night has only just fallen. Hunters go by on the
road, a thing I cannot see. The song of hunting horns echoes under the larches. It has been a long day in among the ploughed fields chasing foxes, badgers or roe-deer. The horses’ nostrils steam white in the night.
The music of the hunt fades away. And I can just decipher the matching initials on the trunks of larches at the edge of the ravine.
No star has plunged to send foam spurting from the ocean,
Nothing disturbs the mountains, the heavens, fire and sea,
Only these feathers flying in horizontal motion
Revealing a bird’s fast fall, a small fatality.
And nothing will stop this single flying feather,
Not the glistening hair of a savage on his horse,
Nor ink in an inkwell, hateful altogether,
Nor the song of waves, nor the tempest’s angry curse,
Nor the sweet necks of women, lovely losers,
Nor the branches of trees and the sealed-up tombs,
Nor the ships with creaking of their midnight hawsers,
Nor the wall where hearts are crafted out of names,
Nor the songs of lepers in the grim bog’s quaking,
Nor the sleeping mirror down along the avenue
Reflecting at all times a streetlamp shaking,
With never, snowy beauty, a woman’s limbs to view;
Nor the sea-monsters with their soot-blackened scales,
Nor the northern hazes with their deep blue scars,
Nor the twilit window where a woman recalls
Dreamily the memory of future love-affairs,
Nor the cries that echo from a wayfarer lost,
Nor the scudding clouds nor horses at the trot,
Nor on quays and arches the shadow someone cast,
Plunging, with a paving-stone dangling at his throat,
Nor you, Deadly Accuser, with hands of waxen lustre:
The stars in heaven, hands and eyes and blood and love,
Are so many rockets fired and bursting from a crater.
Goodbye! Here’s morning, bone-white like a breaking wave.
You hands that long for love on which to bruise yourselves,
We’ll know how to give you the tint of blood’s baptism:
Beside it the brightness of furnace-fires dissolves,
The sun pales, moribund in sea-fog’s dismal bosom.
They knew all our thinking, the world’s most lovely eyes,
There was no famous vice we did not essay,
But for all the kisses and insensate lecheries
Hope within our grieving hearts was never snuffed away.
Then I saw swing open two gates of crystal
On the purer crystal of a phantom most adorable:
“Fling it in the stream, fling down your heart of metal,
Shatter the jugs on the table-tops of marble!
“Burst your eyes and eardrums, and let your tongues
Be spat out of your mouths for hungry dogs to eat;
Desires are boats in heavy seas: give them your So Longs.
Let cords tightly knotted bruise your hands and feet.
“Be humbled! Lose in the flooding of your terror
Your hope and your pride and your specious dignity.
I shall increase your suffering and horror,
I shall practise on you exquisite cruelty.”
She it was who spoke: the woman, the amorous,
Her heart and eyes of crystal, her pitiless nature.
The loveliest eyes of all, o well-springs luminous!
Beautiful mouth, teeth of a prowling creature.
Thrust both your hands into my compliant brain!
Bite my lip pretending to love me with a kiss.
Strength and pride are virtues easy to attain:
What’s hard when foisted on love is loneliness.
I spoke of a falling bird and a spectral shadow
My dream mislays the words of my mouth’s uttering
Hollowed out with graves as I speak is the meadow
Brightly rings an echo, sound of hammering.
A gallows is erected in the prison next door.
The condemned man sleeping in a too narrow bed
Dreams of the giant crows that winged across the moor
The day he encountered enchantment and dread.
Side by side these two zealous phantasms walked,
The brambles ripping at their coats and faces,
False lovers mercilessly punished by their fault
Following on pilgrimage to no end of places.
Village thatches sizzled with conflagrations.
Fish that were drawn to the dragnets far aloft
Slowly ascended through ramifications.
Woodcutters spra
ng from every humble croft.
Sleeping the condemned man addressed one of the pair,
Axe was laid to spectral oak, more spectral still was he:
“Far away the cattle is lowing, can you hear,
This wind breaks their tethers (he said) and sets them free.”
Cruel woman! All through the night her voice is heard.
Her lips are a fruit that is poison to the taste.
Heaven and the mountains where herd calls out to herd
All are one confusion we contemplate amazed.
Whom the birds bewitched, the one who love has cheated,
In black labyrinths under sombre portico,
The lover will search for the brand-mark of the sword-blade
Tempered in her very heart by Isis fire-hearted…
Perfect steel, you sister of rivers’ mystic flow!
Songbird in a birdcage once
Sang for her, it sings no more
And the queen of swallows turns
Nevermore, turns nevermore.
Once I encountered the vulture and the osprey.
They cast shadows on the ground that failed to frighten me.
Scrawled on chalk sea-ramparts I later on deciphered
Charcoaled initials of a name well-known to me.
A vampire with its wing brushed against my window-pane:
It has a crown of lake-weed, welcome guest come hither,
Round its neck live ladybirds make a pretty chain,
Harbingers of love and of splendid summer weather.
to take her to bed
to sleep side by side
for parallel dreaming
breath doubled on breath
to take her to bed
for the one magic shadow
the one single warmth
the one isolation
to take her to bed
one daybreak two sharing
one midnight the same
identical phantoms
to take her to take her to bed
for absolute love
for vice for vice
for all kinds of kisses
to take her to bed
for awe-stricken shipwreck
for mutual whoring
for melding together
to take her to bed
to prove us and prove to us truly
this thing never weighed on two lovers’ body and soul
the lie of original blemish
having always the greatest love for her
is quite easy
yet there is doubt for fiery hearts, faithful hearts
having the greatest love always
are there betrayals unwilled
no the flesh never lies
and no matter how vicious the body is pure
pure as the greatest love for her
in my heart uniquely it flourishes free
no stain has touched the image of her
the only-beloved in the heart of the lover
no stain touched the greatest love for her
for purity we admire the diamond
no stain on the diamond nor on the heart of her
the most-beloved in the heart of the lover
the genuine lover adept of the greatest love
is no abstainer ascetic or puritan
if he tries the loveliest bodies of women
it is knowing the loveliest is his beloved
the genuine lover that rake
his mouth has known and checked out all the kisses
let him surrender to every vice
he’d be all the better
for the genuine lover unloved by her
what does he care he will love her
eternally he will long to be loved
hopeless love will make him pure as a diamond
his body will just be a scrap and a morsel
for false loving women false loves
having no pity
the genuine lover will sacrifice all for the woman he loves
why not if he still has the greatest love for her
on the day of the longed-for encounter
he will be beyond sunrise beyond fire
ready for ecstasy
always having the greatest love for her
the body cannot betray
may your heart always beat for her
your eyes close on her image alone
to be loved by her
not happiness joy
not even desire
it’s will no it’s fate
to be loved by her
not for one night of many
but endless the present for ever
no landscape no light
to be loved by her
inscribed in the waymarks of time
regardless of bygones and future
no end
and yet to be loved by her
all must be lost even love
no talk please of life
nor of love nor of love
to be loved by her
it’s unavoidable
no songs no shouts
no emotion
to be loved by her
impassive marble frozen seas implacable skies
to wait and to wait on and on to be waiting
to wait denied by eternity
to die after she does
this role devolves on the lover
his alone is the ultimate right
to carve a name on a mouldering stone
to carve a name on a mouldering tree
to be snuffed out for ever
snuffed out him after her
but the love the greatest
will burn an unquenchable flame.
Darling these many months of love you’ve been
Incurious that I am working hard
My days are governed by a grim routine
My nights escorted by an honour-guard.
Must I still tend and stir a beacon-glow
More fierce than any phoenix might endure,
A castaway, my pages torn to show
To every passing ship, a futile chore?
To quench my faith, is life to be laid down?
My dream-world holds your image high aloft
I conjured for you countries of renown
What may traverse them better than your ghost?
If I must die at rival idols’ feet
I’m ready. You excel in cruelty.
The merest echo of a futile heat
Abating in your annals I shall be.
I give my heart and all, turn bloodless spook
Submissive to delight of deadly pain
Just for the briefest mention in a book
Never on twilit lovers’ lips again.
I’m tired of wrestling with fate’s waywardness,
Tired of expunging and recalling too
Each perfume-wisp emerging from your dress,
Tired of detesting and of blessing you.
I was not so little worth, but you were not aware.
One sunny day of days on the rocky shore
Remember your lover with his heart stripped bare
Fearless and without reproach, your faithful servitor.
Must I drop my anchor in some far distant place
Before you notice no-one is fawning at your knee?
You’ll say: ‘Who’s gone missing? I don’t recall his face:
Why’s he made a lonely dash for liberty?
“He must be recaptured, my disloyal slave,
Chained in my penal camp, properly chastised.
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With a model heart he must diligently serve,
Meet with no compassion, condignly penalised.
“For I am imperious, I must be obeyed.
No-one may be absent unless I grant release.
Once again subjected to service, woe betide
One too proud and haughty to mumble penances.
“Prisons for hearts, I know of some, fantastic!
Better show up soon, that lover on the run.
Tonight I have a number of vacancies domestic,
Wipe and shine my shoes, get my overcoat on.”
But what’s the good? The escaper knows his prison.
Surrealist, Lover, Resistant Page 17