No More Learning

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. . . Mysticis umbraculis
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O so dear
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Sea Breeze
Index of First Lines
A Toast

Nothing, this foam, virgin verse

Depicting the chalice alone:

Far off a band of Sirens drown

Many of them head first.

We sail, O my various

Friends, I already at the stern,

You at the lavish prow that churns

The lightning's and the winters' flood:

A sweet intoxication urges me

Despite pitching, tossing, fearlessly

To offer this toast while standing

Solitude, reef, and starry veil

To whatever's worthy of knowing

The white anxiety of our sail.

Futile Petition

Princess! In jealousy of a Hebe's fate

Rising over this cup at your lips' kisses,

I spend my fires with the slender rank of prelate

And won't even figure naked on Sevres dishes.

Since I'm not your pampered poodle,

Pastille, rouge or sentimental game

And know your shuttered glance at me too well,

Blonde whose hairdressers have goldsmiths' names!

Name me. . .
you whose laughters strawberry-crammed

Are mingling with a flock of docile lambs

Everywhere grazing vows bleating joy the while,

Name me. . . so that Love winged with a fan

Paints me there, lulling the fold, flute in hand,

Princess, name me the shepherd of your smiles.


A Negress

Possessed by some demon now a negress

Would taste a girl-child saddened by strange fruits

Forbidden ones too under the ragged dress,

This glutton's ready to try a trick or two:

To her belly she twins two fortunate tits

And, so high that no hand knows how to seize her,

Thrusts the dark shock of her booted legs

Just like a tongue unskilled in pleasure.

Facing the timorous nakedness of the gazelle

That trembles, on her back like an elephant gone wild,

Waiting upside down, she keenly admires herself,

Laughing with her bared teeth at the child:

And, between her legs where the victim's couched,

Raising the black flesh split beneath its mane,

Advances the palate of that alien mouth

Pale, rosy as a shell from the Spanish Main.


Distress

I don't come to conquer your flesh tonight, O beast

In whom are the sins of the race, nor to stir

In your foul tresses a mournful tempest

Beneath the fatal boredom my kisses pour:

A heavy sleep without those dreams that creep

Under curtains alien to remorse, I ask of your bed,

Sleep you can savour after your dark deceits,

You who know more of Nothingness than the dead.

For Vice, gnawing this inborn nobleness of mine

Marked me, like you, with its sterility,

But shroud-haunted, pale, destroyed, I flee

While that heart no tooth of any crime

Can wound lives in your breast of stone,

Frightened of dying while I sleep alone.

Summer Sadness

The sun, on the sand, O sleeping wrestler,

Warms a languid bath in the gold of your hair,

Melting the incense on your hostile features,

Mixing an amorous liquid with the tears.

The immutable calm of this white burning,

O my fearful kisses, makes you say, sadly,

'Will we ever be one mummified winding,

Under the ancient sands and palms so happy? '

But your tresses are a tepid river,

Where the soul that haunts us drowns, without a shiver

And finds the Nothingness you cannot know!

I'll taste the unguent of your eyelids' shore,

To see if it can grant to the heart, at your blow,

The insensibility of stones and the azure.


The Clown Chastised

Eyes, lakes of my simple passion to be reborn

Other than as the actor who gestures with his hand

As with a pen, and evokes the foul soot of the lamps,

Here's a window in the walls of cloth I've torn.

With legs and arms a limpid treacherous swimmer

With endless leaps, disowning the sickness

Hamlet! It's as if I began to build in the ocean depths

A thousand tombs: to vanish still virgin there.

Mirthful gold of a cymbal beaten with fists,

The sun all at once strikes the pure nakedness

That breathed itself out of my coolness of nacre,

Rancid night of the skin, when you swept over me,

Not knowing, ungrateful one, that it was, this make-up,

My whole anointing, drowned in ice-water perfidy.