a taste of french poetry at its best

The Landscape-ROBERT DESNOS

I have dreamt of loving. I go on loving but love
Is no longer that bouquet of lilacs and roses
Imbuing with their fragrances the forest
Where a flame lies at rest at the end of undeviating pathways.

I have dreamt of loving. I go on loving but love
Is no longer that storm whose lightening lays
Its funeral pyres on castles, disorientates, distorts,
Illumine as it vanishes the parting of the ways.

It is the spark of flint beneath my footsteps in the night,
The word no dictionary in the world has translated,
The foam on the sea, that cloud in the sky.

In growing old all things become rigid and luminous,
Boulevards without names and ropes without knots.
I feel myself stiffening with the landscape.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD [a excerpt from his poem "Farewell"]

Sometimes I see in the sky beaches without end covered with white nations of joyfulness. Above me a great golden vessel waves its multi colored pennants in the morning breezes.
I created all festivals, all triumphs, all dramas. I tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues. I thought I was acquiring supernatural powers. Well! I must bury my imagination and my memories. An artist and storyteller’s fine fame swept away!

I! I who called myself mage or angel, exempt from all morality, I am returned to the earth, with a task to discover, and wrinkled reality to embrace! Peasant!

Am I deceived? Could charity be, for me, the sister of death?

To round things off, I shall ask pardon for having fed on lies. And let’s go.

Quintessential Night

Schubert plagiarizes Beethoven
And creates an original masterpiece-
Serenading the moon

Hemingway reads Faulkner
Over a bottle of whiskey

Bespectacled

Headlights flicker over jammed flyovers
Leading to nowhere

Horns sermonize
The silent mass of dreamers
Snoring
horses running in a derby around the moon

Floating like a paper boat

Christ kneels and touches the heavens!
For the resurrection of mankind


As dawn breaks there will be billions carrying the Cross.

The pane of dreams

I sit with my eyes against the pane of dreams
Observing your invisibility in the shadows of the dark night
Illuminating your absence like the hot summer sun
That I see you at ten fingers breadth back from the heart.

I seek you beyond myself.

I live not by the breath that flows in and flows out.
I live as a reflection of my own memory of you.

I seek you beyond the Self.