for des Esseintes

Hyperbole ! from my memory
Triumphantly you know how
To arise today like spells in
An iron-bound book

Because I install, by my science,
The hymn of spiritual hearts
In the work of my patience,
Atlases, herbals, and rites

We took our faces for a walk
(We were two, I say we were)
By many a charming landscape
O sister, comparing it to you

The era of authority becomes clouded
When, for no reason, we say
Of this afternoon that our double
Unconsciousness deepens

That its site, soil of a hundred irises,
They know if indeed it ever was,
It does not bear a name which quotes
The gold of the summer trumpet.

Yes, on an island which the air charges
With sight and not with visions
Every flower opened wider
Without us talking about it.

Some, immense, as each
Usually adorned itself
With a lucid outline, a gap,
Which separated it from the gardens.

Glory of the long desire, Ideas
Everything in me was excited to see
The family of fleurs-de-lys
Springing up in this new duty.

But this sensible and soft sister
Did not send her glance farther
Than that smile, and to understand it
I busy myself, my old concern

O! Let the Spirit of dispute know,
At this time when we are silent,
When the stem of multiple lilies
Grew too much for our reasons

And not as the shore weeps
When its dreary game dissembles
By wanting the magnitude to happen
Amid my young astonishment

To hear all the sky and the boundless
Map witnessed by my steps,
By the stream itself which meandered
When this country did not exist.

The child abandons her ecstasy
And erudite already by the roads
She says the word: Anastase!
Born for eternal scrolls

Before a tomb she laughs
Through any weather, her ancestor,
To bear this name: Pulcheria!
Hidden by the excessive gladioli.

10/09/08