No More Learning

My books closed again on Paphos' name,

It delights me to choose with solitary genius

A ruin, by foam-flecks in thousands blessed

Beneath hyacinth, far off, in days of fame.

Let the cold flow with its silence of scythes,

I'll not ululate here in a 'no' that's empty

If this frolic so white near the ground denies

To each site the honour of false scenery.

My hunger regaled by no fruits here I see

Finds equal taste in their learned deficiency:

Let one burst with human fragrance and flesh!

While my love pokes the fire, foot on cold iron

I brood for a long time perhaps with distress

On the other's seared breast of an ancient Amazon.

Sigh

My soul, towards your brow where O calm sister,

An autumn dreams, blotched by reddish smudges,

And towards the errant sky of your angelic eye

Climbs: as in a melancholy garden the true sigh

Of a white jet of water towards the Azure!

- To the Azure that October stirred, pale, pure,

That in the vast pools mirrors infinite languor,

And over dead water, where the leaves wander

The wind, in russet throes, dig their cold furrow,

Allows a long ray of yellow light to flow.

Homage

Each Dawn however numb

To raise a fist obscure

Against trumpets of azure

Sounded by her, the dumb,

Has the shepherd with his gourd

Joined to a rod struck harshly

Along the path to be

Till the vast stream's outpoured

Already thus solitary

You live O Puvis

De Chavannes

never alone

Lead our age to quench its thirst

From the shroud-less nymph, the one

Whom your glory will rehearse

. . . Mysticis umbraculis

She slept: her finger trembled, amethyst-less

And naked, under her nightdress:

After a deep sigh, ceased, cambric raised to her waist.

And her belly seemed of snow on which might rest,

If a ray of light re-gilded the forest,

A bright goldfinch's mossy nest.

Fan

(Of Mery Laurent)

Frigid roses to last

Identically will interrupt

With a calyx, white, abrupt,

Your breath become frost

But freed by my fluttering

By shock profound, the sheaf

Of frigidity melts to relief

Of laughter's rapturous flowering.

In carving out the sky

Like a fine fan you ply

Outdoing that phial's glass

Without loss or violation

Unable to hold fast

Mery's sweet emanation.

O so dear

O so dear from far and near and white all

So deliciously you, Mery, that I dream

Of what impossibly flows, of some rare balm

Over some flower-vase of darkened crystal.

Do you know it, yes!
For me, for years, here,

Forever, your dazzling smile prolongs

The one rose with its perfect summer gone

Into times past, yet then on into the future.

My heart that sometimes at night tries to confer,

Or name you most tender with whatever last word

Rejoices in that which whispers none but sister -

Were it not, such short tresses so great a treasure,

That you teach me a sweetness, quite other,

Soft through the kiss murmured only in your hair.

(Note: Dated 1895. This being one of the series of poems written for Mery Laurent, a friend also of Manet and others. )

Sonnet

(Mery, sans trop d'aurore. . . )

Mery,

Without dawn too grossly now inflaming

The rose, that splendid, natural and weary

Sheds even her heavy veil of perfumes to hear

Beneath the flesh the diamond weeping,

Yes, without those dewy crises! And gently,

Unbroken when the sky fills with storm,

Jealous to add who knows what spaces

To simple day the day so true in feeling,

Does it not seem, Mery, that each year,

Where spontaneous grace relights your brow,

Suffices, in so many aspects and for me,

Like a lone fan with which a room's surprised,

To refresh with as little pain as is needed here

All our inborn and unvarying friendship.

Autumn Plaint

Since Maria left me to go to another star - which one, Orion, Altair - or you green Venus? - I have always loved solitude. How many long days I have passed alone with my cat. By alone I mean without a material being, and my cat is a mystic companion, a spirit. I can say then that I have passed long days alone with my cat and alone with one of the last authors of the Roman decadence; for since the white creature is no more I have loved, uniquely and strangely, everything summed up in the word: fall. So, in the year, my favourite season is the last slow part of summer that just precedes autumn, and, in the day, the hour when I walk is when the sun hesitates before vanishing, with rays of yellow bronze over the grey walls, and rays of red copper over the tiles. Literature, also, from which my spirit asks voluptuousness, that will be the agonised poetry of Rome's last moments, so long as it does not breathe a breath of the reinvigorated stance of the Barbarians or stammer in childish Latin like Christian prose.