Love Song

I sit here with my back to the whole world,
and think of things to write about you.
Out west, the selvage of evening is fading
over lonesome hillsides into shades of sunset.
A cool breeze whispers its way down through the fields,
bearing along the sound of crickets singing the day to sleep
and the soft sweetness of summer rains to come.
I look back and watch the highway behind me
and its thousand travelers vanish into the night,
and I think of crossroads and places I’ve been,
days of wandering and nights of parting
from faraway palaces and the ashes of campfires.
Then I look back to the horizon, and the soft warm glow
of pastel red and orange against night’s cool blue,
and I think only of you.

The Drunken Boat

As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers
I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers:
Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targets
Nailing them naked to coloured stakes.

I cared nothing for all my crews,
Carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons.
When, along with my haulers those uproars were done with
The Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased.

Into the ferocious tide-rips
Last winter, more absorbed than the minds of children,
I ran! And the unmoored Peninsulas
Never endured more triumphant clamourings

The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings.
Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves
Which men call eternal rollers of victims,
For ten nights, without once missing the foolish eye of the harbor lights!

Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children,
The green water penetrated my pinewood hull
And washed me clean of the bluish wine-stains and the splashes of vomit,
Carrying away both rudder and anchor.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down;

Where, suddenly dyeing the bluenesses, deliriums
And slow rhythms under the gleams of the daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than music
Ferment the bitter rednesses of love!

I have come to know the skies splitting with lightnings, and the waterspouts
And the breakers and currents; I know the evening,
And Dawn rising up like a flock of doves,
And sometimes I have seen what men have imagined they saw!

I have seen the low-hanging sun speckled with mystic horrors.
Lighting up long violet coagulations,
Like the performers in very-antique dramas
Waves rolling back into the distances their shiverings of venetian blinds!

I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled snows
The kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas,
The circulation of undreamed-of saps,
And the yellow-blue awakenings of singing phosphorus!

I have followed, for whole months on end, the swells
Battering the reefs like hysterical herds of cows,
Never dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could force back the muzzles of snorting Oceans!

I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas
Where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers
In human skins! Rainbows stretched like bridles
Under the seas' horizon, to glaucous herds!

I have seen the enormous swamps seething, traps
Where a whole leviathan rots in the reeds!
Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm
And distances cataracting down into abysses!

Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs
Where the giant snakes devoured by vermin
Fall from the twisted trees with black odours!

I should have liked to show to children those dolphins
Of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.
- Foam of flowers rocked my driftings
And at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.

Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea whose sobs sweetened my rollings
Lifted its shadow-flowers with their yellow sucking disks toward me
And I hung there like a kneeling woman...

Almost an island, tossing on my beaches the brawls
And droppings of pale-eyed, clamouring birds,
And I was scudding along when across my frayed cordage
Drowned men sank backwards into sleep!

But now I, a boat lost under the hair of coves,
Hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether,
I, whose wreck, dead-drunk and sodden with water,
neither Monitor nor Hanse ships would have fished up;

Free, smoking, risen from violet fogs,
I who bored through the wall of the reddening sky
Which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious,
Lichens of sunlight [mixed] with azure snot,

Who ran, speckled with lunula of electricity,
A crazy plank, with black sea-horses for escort,
When Julys were crushing with cudgel blows
Skies of ultramarine into burning funnels;

I who trembled, to feel at fifty leagues' distance
The groans of Behemoth's rutting, and of the dense Maelstroms
Eternal spinner of blue immobilities
I long for Europe with it's aged old parapets!

I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to sailor:
- Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights,
Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future? -

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter:
Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours.
O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!

If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the
Black cold pool where into the scented twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, launches
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.

I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves,
Sail in the wake of the carriers of cottons,
Nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants,
Nor pull past the horrible eyes of the hulks.

Translated by Oliver Bernard: Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems (1962).

Water Poisoning

There is no such thing as pride or shame
in the shadow of the trees of Eden.
The beggar and the king sing the same drunken songs;
the pilgrim and the pilgrimage are one and the same.
The most ordinary things-- a cool summer breeze,
the warmth of the sun and the passing of day into night--
seem like verses of poetry that have taken on new meaning,
while all who were extraordinary-- who stood before the world
like Bayazid before the divine, exalting his own name--
are left unexceptional, victim of that most human of defects.
And the nomad who no longer knows the way back home
finds themselves at last at the gates of the garden, and will never know
if they have come to Eden or Gethsemane.

Lamp do not soot.
Out of the wall drove a slender woman’s arm.
It was pale and blue-veined.
The fingers were with precious rings bepatched.
When I kissed the hand, I startled:
It was alive and warm.
My face got scratched.
I took a kitchen knife and cut a few veins.
A large cat daintily licked up the blood from the floor.
A man, meanwhile, with bristling hair crawled
Up a broomstick leant aslant against the wall

translated by Rolf-Peter Wille

Two men living down a well.
Cut off, in the dark.
Blundering blindly, getting locked in toilets,
leaving eternal tears in cardboard football pitches.
Getting into places unimaginable.
Striding into restaurant kitchens to find answers,
groping into midnight wardrobes, primed to urinate.

A clock ticks on in the hallway,
shedding seconds, minutes, years.
One man hears nothing, one hears it only.
One man hears Morse code at four in the morning.
SOS. SOS. Get up. Boil eggs.

Two men taking a short walk.
To pay the papers, presumably.
Coming back with a pint glass,
leaving it in the fridge.
Since it fits so well in the hand.
The well runs with dark water,
drained like clockwork.

A clock ticks on in the hallway
and the little boy is unnerved.
One man takes him on his knee,
one man starts up a poem.
There was room on the raft for one.

Two men putting on old clothes.
Clothes that make them old.
Loose underpants, stained shirts,
dressing gowns that have a history like a weary king’s.
Wearing them out.
The well shaft deepens and narrows,
and the little boy is looking down.

The clock stands stopped in the hallway,
two hands left pointing athwart.
A young man stares, hears it again.
That rhythmic knock is in the wood
of that old grandfather clock.

In paths that they have not known

Was it out of mere love that Ishaq stayed
all his days and nights in that land by the sea?
Was it only love whose promise decided
the course of his years before they were lived?
Lifetimes I spent singing, the way a drunkard
sings, lost in the haze of drink-- dreaming,
the way a saint dreams of a pilgrimage to death--
until that day, at daybreak, I opened my mouth,
and the voice that sang was yours; that night,
I slept, and all the colors in which I dreamed,
every shade belonged to you. For that alone,
I would have loved you-- for that alone,
I would have believed, somewhere in the mornings out there,
in the warmth of summer and the vastness of years,
the sun would rise, the sea would swell,
and we would walk, hand in hand, out
into the wide open wilderness of Faran,
and no man or God could presume to tell us
which way led to the promised land,
and which way led to nowhere at all.

Absolute Knowing

You ask how far it is from here to Karbala--
you who stand in the place where joy and death
became one and the same. What could be greater?
The chest you beat in mourning is a shrine;
the sins you grieve are blessings in disguise.
Your long, sleepless nights are tombstones
in remembrance of things best left behind--
of redemption, of self, of right and wrong.
And if these words strike you as heresies,
then see for yourself--
sing the old songs, recite the old verses,
seek in them the knowing of the seen and the unseen,
to say those words that cannot be said
by those who say them--
to learn that knowledge that cannot be known
by those who know it.