The Flowers of Evil, page 10
The harmony is so exquisite
that holds sway over all she is
that nobody could analyze it
or single out the melodies.
That dazzling unity drives all
my senses wild with astonishment
so that her breath is musical
and words she says are full of scent.”
42 What will you say tonight . . .
What will you say tonight, poor lonesome soul?
What will you say, old withered heart of mine,
to her, most good, most dear, most beautiful,
beneath whose sacred eyes you bloom again?
—Now we will proudly magnify her fame:
nothing excels the sweetness of her sway;
her holy body smells like cherubim;
her gaze wraps us in clothes as bright as day.
Whether it be at night in solitude
or on a thoroughfare among a crowd,
her ghost precedes me like a torch’s flame:
“I, who am beautiful, urge you to adore
all that is beautiful through me. I am
your Virgin, Muse and Angel Overseer.”
43 The Lit Torch
They march before me—brilliant eyes some keen
angel has gifted with magnetic powers.
Divine fraternal twins, brothers of mine,
they pull my eyes up toward their gem-like fires.
They save me from the snares of vice and crime
and guide me down the path of Beauty. They
attend on me; I am enslaved to them.
They are a lit torch which I must obey.
The mystic light you shine, Alluring Eyes,
is candles in the daytime, and a red
sun never puts out your fantastic blaze.
But you are bracing; candles serve the dead.
Stars of a flame the sun cannot excel,
the song you pipe while marching stirs my soul.
43x To One Who Is Too Cheerful
Your head, your attitude, your ways
are lovely as the countryside.
Like breezy days without a cloud
the smiles that animate your eyes.
The passerby your presence warms
is smitten with you in your prime
that radiates with so much vim
out of your shoulders and your arms.
The bright hues and the radiance
in which you dress yourself make all
the poets out there, heart and soul,
see, in their minds, a flower dance.
Those crazy clothes are emblems of
the extravagance of you, the thrill.
Madwoman, I am mad as well,
and I abominate you, love.
Sometimes in green and pleasant places
to which I have lugged my great ennui,
I have suffered as, like irony,
rays of the sun chewed me to pieces.
And then the springtime greenery
has so demoralized my heart
that I have ripped a flower apart
to punish Nature’s pomposity.
So in the hour of sensuousness,
late, late at night, I wish I could
glide thief-like over to your bed
and climb your body’s treasure-house
and spoil your all-too-healthy rind
by mutilating your tempting breast
and cutting, in a haunch, a vast
and terribly unshallow wound,
and then, O dizzying temptation,
by parting those lips of yours, my dear,
those lovely, vivid lips you wear,
passionately inject my poison.
44 Reversibility
Glad angel, do you know disquietude,
sighs, degradation, penitence, vexations
and frightening nights’ obscure abominations
which crumple up the heart into a wad?
Glad angel, do you know disquietude?
Angel of kindness, do you know distemper,
fists clenching in the dark and tears of gall,
when Vengeance beats out rhythms born in Hell
and makes, of all our faculties, his empire?
Angel of kindness, do you know distemper?
Healthy angel, do you know disease
which, like an outcast, limps through hospital rooms?
Hoping to see sunlight, a few stray beams,
he does his best to speak but just makes noise.
Healthy angel, do you know disease?
Angel of beauty, do you know the fear
of wrinkling, aging, and the hideous
torment of seeing, in a person’s eyes,
a former passion turning to a chore?
Angel of beauty, do you know the fear?
Angel of light and mirth and happiness,
the dying David would have claimed the bloom
that radiates from your tantalizing prime,°
but all I want to ask of you is grace,
angel of light and mirth and happiness.
45 Confession
Sweet and endearing friend, one time, just once,
you placed your fine arm on my own
(and deep down in my spirit’s dark confines
the memory of that touch lives on):
midnight and, like a medal made of silver,
the harvest moon was shining down.
It seemed the hour’s sincerity, like a river,
was flowing through the sleeping town.
There were some cats that crept about like thieves
among the houses and the stalls.
Their ears were pricked; like specters out of graves,
they followed slowly at our heels.
All of a sudden, in the confidence
born of the night surrounding us,
from you, most resonant of instruments,
a fiddle filled with joyousness,
from you, as vigorously as at dawn
a bugle sounds the reveille,
a funny tone, a melancholy tone,
escaped your lips and limped away
as if it were a sickly, foul, obscene
child, an entire family’s shame,
one whom they, to conceal it from the sun,
keep locked up in a basement room.
It sang, poor thing, the selfsame note you sighed:
“Nothing is trustworthy down here.
Self-interest always rears its ugly head,
whatever paint it tries to wear.
Being a beauty is a full-time job,
a boring job, the tedious toil
of the crazed dancer who can only sob
behind a mechanistic smile.
Trusting in others is preposterous
since love and loneliness break down,
and Darkness bags the rubble, piece by piece,
and lugs it to oblivion.”
I still recall her quiet apathy,
the moonlight like a witch’s spell,
and the dread secret that she hissed to me
as if in a confessional.
46 The Spiritual Dawn
When, partnered with the rodentine Ideal,
white-rosy dawn reaches the drunkards’ dive,
an angel, to fulfill some punitive
decree, wakes in a sleepy animal.
The distant azure of the Sacred Sky
opens and yawns with infinite allure,
for downcast men who ache and still aspire.
That’s how, pure Being, darling Deity,
over the ruins of a drunken rout,
the rosier, more enticing memory
of you glints always in my widened eyes.
The rising sun has put the candles out.
You, soul who always shines triumphantly,
are equal to the sun that never dies.
47 The Harmony of Evening °
Right now the stems are quivering; right now
flowers, like censers, loose, each, a bouquet.
Sounds and perfumes are mingling in the sky,
a mournful waltz, a languid vertigo.
Flowers, like censers, loose, each, a bouquet;
the trembling violin is full of woe,
a mournful waltz, a languid vertigo.
The sky, an altar cloth, is shadowy.
The trembling violin is full of woe,
a tender heart that hates vacuity.
The sky, an altar cloth, is shadowy.
The sun is sliding down like dark blood flow.
A tender heart that hates vacuity
gathers up embers of a bygone glow.
The sun is sliding down like dark blood flow.
You, like a monstrance,° light my memory.
48 The Perfume Bottle
There are intense perfumes to which all matter is
pervious. You could say they pass through glass.
For instance, opening a chest brought from the East,
a chest whose old lock squeaks and squeals because of rust,
or in an empty house while searching an armoire
rife with the dark and dusty fragrance of the days of yore,
you sometimes find an age-old bottle filled with lost
memories. Pick it up, and you revive a ghost.
A thousand thoughts were sleeping in obscurity,
a thousand gently trembling cocoons, and they,
tinted with azure, glazed with rose, gold-glittering,
fledge themselves of a sudden and are on the wing.
Intoxicating memory leaps into the nose
on currents of disturbance; you must close your eyes.
Vertigo wrestles the already vanquished soul
through the abysmal recesses of human smell
and drops it to the bottom of an ancient pit
where, just as Lazarus once tore his winding-sheet,°
a ghostly corpse comes back to life—the specter of
a long-dead and seductive, rancid sort of love.
So it will be for me that, when I am no more
in people’s memories, when, in the woeful drawer
in which I have been left behind, I lie, an old
bottle—decrepit, cracked and dusty, ringed with mold,
I will become, O luscious pestilence, your grave
and testify to the intensity you have.
O poison mixed by seraphim, like alcohol
you gnaw my senses! You begin and end my soul!
49 Poison
Wine can invest a foul depression with
most marvelous luxuries
and make fantastic rows of columns rise
from its alchemic breath,
breath crimson as the sun in dirty skies.
Opium spreads beyond all boundaries,
expands on boundlessness,
makes hours never-ending, augments bliss,
and with dark, dismal joys
surfeits the spirit with expansiveness.
But those are nothing to the venom flowing
out of your eyes, those round,
green and reflective lakes that warp my mind . . .
My dreams are always going
into those bitter fathoms to be drowned.
And yet the miracle of your saliva
by far exceeds them all.
It sinks its teeth in, shakes and hurls my soul
ruthlessly down a river,
and I go tumbling all the way to Hell!
50 Cloudy Sky
One could describe your gaze as “lost in rain.”
Your baffling eyes (are they blue, gray or green?)
by turns compassionate, dreamy or merciless,
reflect the tedium of pallid skies.
Dear, you evoke white-veiled and lukewarm hours
that make the hearts of the entranced shed tears
and make their nerves, stirred by some undefined
and racking pain, jeer at the sleeping mind.
You seem at times a beautiful horizon
lit up at sunset in a misty season . . .
O cloudy patch, touched by a few stray beams,
despite the rainfall, you go up in flames!
Dangerous women, ravishing milieu,
will I adore, in time, hoarfrost and snow?
Will I extract, from stubborn winter, joys
even more keen than those of iron and ice?
51 The Cat
I.
A strong, sweet, handsome and glamorous
cat is strolling inside of me
as if I were his property.
You scarcely hear when he meows;
his voice is so soft and amiable.
But, when he utters a purr or growl,
it becomes very powerful.
Such is his secret and his spell.
Those sounds, turned into liquid, sink
into the darkest depths of me.
They fill me up like poetry
and refresh me like a magic drink.
Able to slake the keenest anguish,
his voice holds many ecstasies
inside itself. It can express
epics without the use of language.
My heart is like a violin,
and there is no bow anywhere
that plays a concert in me more
sublimely and resonantly than
the sound of you, mysterious,
bizarre and seraphic animal.
As in the nature of angels, all
of you is fine and harmonious.
II.
His patchwork coat emits so sweet
a fragrance that one night I was
embalmed in much perfume because
I gave him just one little pet.
My household’s guardian spirit, he
presides and judges, rules in glory
over his whole territory.
Is he an elf? A deity?
My eyes, as if by magnetic attraction,
gape at the loved beast. But, when they
are able to look tamely away,
and I succumb to self-reflection,
I see, surprising, inside of me
his pale irises up in flames,
illustrious beacons, living gems,
that contemplate me fixedly.
52 The Beautiful Ship
Soft sorceress, I will describe to you
that youth of yours where many graces glow.
I want to paint an elegance
where ripeness is allied with innocence.
When you, with your full skirts, go sweeping by,
you seem a fine ship putting out to sea
with full sails, rocking on the tide
lazily, slowly, sweetly, side to side.
Atop plump shoulders and a stout, round neck
your head bobs with a quaint grace when you walk.
O regal child, how placidly,
how gloriously, you go your way.
Soft sorceress, I will describe to you
that youth of yours where many graces glow.
I want to paint an elegance
where ripeness is allied with innocence.
Your breasts push out whatever dress you wear,
triumphal breasts much like a fine armoire
endowed with bright round bosses that,
like shields for soldiers, give back sparks of light:
exciting shields, inset with tips of rose!
And, in the drawers, sweet secret luxuries,
perfume and fine liqueur and wine,
that stupefy the hearts and minds of men.
When you, with your full skirts, go sweeping by,
you seem a fine ship putting out to sea
with full sails, rocking on the tide
lazily, slowly, sweetly, side to side.
Your noble legs, beneath the silks they chase,
arouse and torment vague proclivities
like twin enchanters mixing up
a dark elixir in a drinking cup.
Your arms, like those of infant Hercules,
like glistening boa-snakes, are made to squeeze
the life out of your prey, as if
you wanted printed on your breast—your love.
Atop plump shoulders and a stout, round neck
your head bobs with a quaint grace when you walk.
O regal child, how placidly,
how gloriously, you go your way.
53 The Invitation to the Voyage
Dream of the joy
of living with me,
my child, my dear. We two
will love all day,
love and then die,
in a land that looks like you.
To me at least,
the overcast
and sweet sun there appears
as mysterious
as your lying eyes
shining through your tears.
There will be nothing but beauty and leisure,
harmony, calm and pleasure.
Shined by the years,
bright tables and chairs
would furnish our shared bedchamber.
Exquisite blooms,
mixing perfumes,
would smell vaguely of amber.
Each sumptuous ceiling
and mirror revealing
Oriental style
would mutely intone
its very own
sweet language to the soul.
There will be nothing but beauty and leisure,
harmony, calm and pleasure.
The ships that dream
on river and stream,
each, in an errant way,
is waiting to bear
your least desire
wherever it wants to be.
—The glorious sun,
as it goes down
on rivers, fields and streets,
will empurple and gild
all we behold
in its hot-blooded glitz.
There will be nothing but beauty and leisure,
harmony, calm and pleasure.
54 The Irreparable
How can we choke Remorse, the die-hard one,
who lives and moves tortuously?
Much like a worm, he gets beneath our skin,
much like a mite, invades the tree.
How can we choke Remorse, the die-hard one?
What nostrum or what vintage or what draught
can drown an age-old nemesis
as nasty as a greedy prostitute
and ant-like in its stubbornness?
What nostrum or what vintage or what draught?
that holds sway over all she is
that nobody could analyze it
or single out the melodies.
That dazzling unity drives all
my senses wild with astonishment
so that her breath is musical
and words she says are full of scent.”
42 What will you say tonight . . .
What will you say tonight, poor lonesome soul?
What will you say, old withered heart of mine,
to her, most good, most dear, most beautiful,
beneath whose sacred eyes you bloom again?
—Now we will proudly magnify her fame:
nothing excels the sweetness of her sway;
her holy body smells like cherubim;
her gaze wraps us in clothes as bright as day.
Whether it be at night in solitude
or on a thoroughfare among a crowd,
her ghost precedes me like a torch’s flame:
“I, who am beautiful, urge you to adore
all that is beautiful through me. I am
your Virgin, Muse and Angel Overseer.”
43 The Lit Torch
They march before me—brilliant eyes some keen
angel has gifted with magnetic powers.
Divine fraternal twins, brothers of mine,
they pull my eyes up toward their gem-like fires.
They save me from the snares of vice and crime
and guide me down the path of Beauty. They
attend on me; I am enslaved to them.
They are a lit torch which I must obey.
The mystic light you shine, Alluring Eyes,
is candles in the daytime, and a red
sun never puts out your fantastic blaze.
But you are bracing; candles serve the dead.
Stars of a flame the sun cannot excel,
the song you pipe while marching stirs my soul.
43x To One Who Is Too Cheerful
Your head, your attitude, your ways
are lovely as the countryside.
Like breezy days without a cloud
the smiles that animate your eyes.
The passerby your presence warms
is smitten with you in your prime
that radiates with so much vim
out of your shoulders and your arms.
The bright hues and the radiance
in which you dress yourself make all
the poets out there, heart and soul,
see, in their minds, a flower dance.
Those crazy clothes are emblems of
the extravagance of you, the thrill.
Madwoman, I am mad as well,
and I abominate you, love.
Sometimes in green and pleasant places
to which I have lugged my great ennui,
I have suffered as, like irony,
rays of the sun chewed me to pieces.
And then the springtime greenery
has so demoralized my heart
that I have ripped a flower apart
to punish Nature’s pomposity.
So in the hour of sensuousness,
late, late at night, I wish I could
glide thief-like over to your bed
and climb your body’s treasure-house
and spoil your all-too-healthy rind
by mutilating your tempting breast
and cutting, in a haunch, a vast
and terribly unshallow wound,
and then, O dizzying temptation,
by parting those lips of yours, my dear,
those lovely, vivid lips you wear,
passionately inject my poison.
44 Reversibility
Glad angel, do you know disquietude,
sighs, degradation, penitence, vexations
and frightening nights’ obscure abominations
which crumple up the heart into a wad?
Glad angel, do you know disquietude?
Angel of kindness, do you know distemper,
fists clenching in the dark and tears of gall,
when Vengeance beats out rhythms born in Hell
and makes, of all our faculties, his empire?
Angel of kindness, do you know distemper?
Healthy angel, do you know disease
which, like an outcast, limps through hospital rooms?
Hoping to see sunlight, a few stray beams,
he does his best to speak but just makes noise.
Healthy angel, do you know disease?
Angel of beauty, do you know the fear
of wrinkling, aging, and the hideous
torment of seeing, in a person’s eyes,
a former passion turning to a chore?
Angel of beauty, do you know the fear?
Angel of light and mirth and happiness,
the dying David would have claimed the bloom
that radiates from your tantalizing prime,°
but all I want to ask of you is grace,
angel of light and mirth and happiness.
45 Confession
Sweet and endearing friend, one time, just once,
you placed your fine arm on my own
(and deep down in my spirit’s dark confines
the memory of that touch lives on):
midnight and, like a medal made of silver,
the harvest moon was shining down.
It seemed the hour’s sincerity, like a river,
was flowing through the sleeping town.
There were some cats that crept about like thieves
among the houses and the stalls.
Their ears were pricked; like specters out of graves,
they followed slowly at our heels.
All of a sudden, in the confidence
born of the night surrounding us,
from you, most resonant of instruments,
a fiddle filled with joyousness,
from you, as vigorously as at dawn
a bugle sounds the reveille,
a funny tone, a melancholy tone,
escaped your lips and limped away
as if it were a sickly, foul, obscene
child, an entire family’s shame,
one whom they, to conceal it from the sun,
keep locked up in a basement room.
It sang, poor thing, the selfsame note you sighed:
“Nothing is trustworthy down here.
Self-interest always rears its ugly head,
whatever paint it tries to wear.
Being a beauty is a full-time job,
a boring job, the tedious toil
of the crazed dancer who can only sob
behind a mechanistic smile.
Trusting in others is preposterous
since love and loneliness break down,
and Darkness bags the rubble, piece by piece,
and lugs it to oblivion.”
I still recall her quiet apathy,
the moonlight like a witch’s spell,
and the dread secret that she hissed to me
as if in a confessional.
46 The Spiritual Dawn
When, partnered with the rodentine Ideal,
white-rosy dawn reaches the drunkards’ dive,
an angel, to fulfill some punitive
decree, wakes in a sleepy animal.
The distant azure of the Sacred Sky
opens and yawns with infinite allure,
for downcast men who ache and still aspire.
That’s how, pure Being, darling Deity,
over the ruins of a drunken rout,
the rosier, more enticing memory
of you glints always in my widened eyes.
The rising sun has put the candles out.
You, soul who always shines triumphantly,
are equal to the sun that never dies.
47 The Harmony of Evening °
Right now the stems are quivering; right now
flowers, like censers, loose, each, a bouquet.
Sounds and perfumes are mingling in the sky,
a mournful waltz, a languid vertigo.
Flowers, like censers, loose, each, a bouquet;
the trembling violin is full of woe,
a mournful waltz, a languid vertigo.
The sky, an altar cloth, is shadowy.
The trembling violin is full of woe,
a tender heart that hates vacuity.
The sky, an altar cloth, is shadowy.
The sun is sliding down like dark blood flow.
A tender heart that hates vacuity
gathers up embers of a bygone glow.
The sun is sliding down like dark blood flow.
You, like a monstrance,° light my memory.
48 The Perfume Bottle
There are intense perfumes to which all matter is
pervious. You could say they pass through glass.
For instance, opening a chest brought from the East,
a chest whose old lock squeaks and squeals because of rust,
or in an empty house while searching an armoire
rife with the dark and dusty fragrance of the days of yore,
you sometimes find an age-old bottle filled with lost
memories. Pick it up, and you revive a ghost.
A thousand thoughts were sleeping in obscurity,
a thousand gently trembling cocoons, and they,
tinted with azure, glazed with rose, gold-glittering,
fledge themselves of a sudden and are on the wing.
Intoxicating memory leaps into the nose
on currents of disturbance; you must close your eyes.
Vertigo wrestles the already vanquished soul
through the abysmal recesses of human smell
and drops it to the bottom of an ancient pit
where, just as Lazarus once tore his winding-sheet,°
a ghostly corpse comes back to life—the specter of
a long-dead and seductive, rancid sort of love.
So it will be for me that, when I am no more
in people’s memories, when, in the woeful drawer
in which I have been left behind, I lie, an old
bottle—decrepit, cracked and dusty, ringed with mold,
I will become, O luscious pestilence, your grave
and testify to the intensity you have.
O poison mixed by seraphim, like alcohol
you gnaw my senses! You begin and end my soul!
49 Poison
Wine can invest a foul depression with
most marvelous luxuries
and make fantastic rows of columns rise
from its alchemic breath,
breath crimson as the sun in dirty skies.
Opium spreads beyond all boundaries,
expands on boundlessness,
makes hours never-ending, augments bliss,
and with dark, dismal joys
surfeits the spirit with expansiveness.
But those are nothing to the venom flowing
out of your eyes, those round,
green and reflective lakes that warp my mind . . .
My dreams are always going
into those bitter fathoms to be drowned.
And yet the miracle of your saliva
by far exceeds them all.
It sinks its teeth in, shakes and hurls my soul
ruthlessly down a river,
and I go tumbling all the way to Hell!
50 Cloudy Sky
One could describe your gaze as “lost in rain.”
Your baffling eyes (are they blue, gray or green?)
by turns compassionate, dreamy or merciless,
reflect the tedium of pallid skies.
Dear, you evoke white-veiled and lukewarm hours
that make the hearts of the entranced shed tears
and make their nerves, stirred by some undefined
and racking pain, jeer at the sleeping mind.
You seem at times a beautiful horizon
lit up at sunset in a misty season . . .
O cloudy patch, touched by a few stray beams,
despite the rainfall, you go up in flames!
Dangerous women, ravishing milieu,
will I adore, in time, hoarfrost and snow?
Will I extract, from stubborn winter, joys
even more keen than those of iron and ice?
51 The Cat
I.
A strong, sweet, handsome and glamorous
cat is strolling inside of me
as if I were his property.
You scarcely hear when he meows;
his voice is so soft and amiable.
But, when he utters a purr or growl,
it becomes very powerful.
Such is his secret and his spell.
Those sounds, turned into liquid, sink
into the darkest depths of me.
They fill me up like poetry
and refresh me like a magic drink.
Able to slake the keenest anguish,
his voice holds many ecstasies
inside itself. It can express
epics without the use of language.
My heart is like a violin,
and there is no bow anywhere
that plays a concert in me more
sublimely and resonantly than
the sound of you, mysterious,
bizarre and seraphic animal.
As in the nature of angels, all
of you is fine and harmonious.
II.
His patchwork coat emits so sweet
a fragrance that one night I was
embalmed in much perfume because
I gave him just one little pet.
My household’s guardian spirit, he
presides and judges, rules in glory
over his whole territory.
Is he an elf? A deity?
My eyes, as if by magnetic attraction,
gape at the loved beast. But, when they
are able to look tamely away,
and I succumb to self-reflection,
I see, surprising, inside of me
his pale irises up in flames,
illustrious beacons, living gems,
that contemplate me fixedly.
52 The Beautiful Ship
Soft sorceress, I will describe to you
that youth of yours where many graces glow.
I want to paint an elegance
where ripeness is allied with innocence.
When you, with your full skirts, go sweeping by,
you seem a fine ship putting out to sea
with full sails, rocking on the tide
lazily, slowly, sweetly, side to side.
Atop plump shoulders and a stout, round neck
your head bobs with a quaint grace when you walk.
O regal child, how placidly,
how gloriously, you go your way.
Soft sorceress, I will describe to you
that youth of yours where many graces glow.
I want to paint an elegance
where ripeness is allied with innocence.
Your breasts push out whatever dress you wear,
triumphal breasts much like a fine armoire
endowed with bright round bosses that,
like shields for soldiers, give back sparks of light:
exciting shields, inset with tips of rose!
And, in the drawers, sweet secret luxuries,
perfume and fine liqueur and wine,
that stupefy the hearts and minds of men.
When you, with your full skirts, go sweeping by,
you seem a fine ship putting out to sea
with full sails, rocking on the tide
lazily, slowly, sweetly, side to side.
Your noble legs, beneath the silks they chase,
arouse and torment vague proclivities
like twin enchanters mixing up
a dark elixir in a drinking cup.
Your arms, like those of infant Hercules,
like glistening boa-snakes, are made to squeeze
the life out of your prey, as if
you wanted printed on your breast—your love.
Atop plump shoulders and a stout, round neck
your head bobs with a quaint grace when you walk.
O regal child, how placidly,
how gloriously, you go your way.
53 The Invitation to the Voyage
Dream of the joy
of living with me,
my child, my dear. We two
will love all day,
love and then die,
in a land that looks like you.
To me at least,
the overcast
and sweet sun there appears
as mysterious
as your lying eyes
shining through your tears.
There will be nothing but beauty and leisure,
harmony, calm and pleasure.
Shined by the years,
bright tables and chairs
would furnish our shared bedchamber.
Exquisite blooms,
mixing perfumes,
would smell vaguely of amber.
Each sumptuous ceiling
and mirror revealing
Oriental style
would mutely intone
its very own
sweet language to the soul.
There will be nothing but beauty and leisure,
harmony, calm and pleasure.
The ships that dream
on river and stream,
each, in an errant way,
is waiting to bear
your least desire
wherever it wants to be.
—The glorious sun,
as it goes down
on rivers, fields and streets,
will empurple and gild
all we behold
in its hot-blooded glitz.
There will be nothing but beauty and leisure,
harmony, calm and pleasure.
54 The Irreparable
How can we choke Remorse, the die-hard one,
who lives and moves tortuously?
Much like a worm, he gets beneath our skin,
much like a mite, invades the tree.
How can we choke Remorse, the die-hard one?
What nostrum or what vintage or what draught
can drown an age-old nemesis
as nasty as a greedy prostitute
and ant-like in its stubbornness?
What nostrum or what vintage or what draught?
