from Mathematical Night

1
 
      While my fire boils, while the moon kisses my door,
the day creeps in, no longer circumscribed
by the stars’ smoky trail.
 
      Over there!—The green box in the clearing of worlds.
 Her face spoke endlessly, in leaps of unknown sweetness.
 
      “It is time,” she says, “your dress is now ready.” 
She points out a great bridge of scales: the very one
where storks were strolling on crutches.
      I ask her if there are any more seasons.
“No,” she says, “since you are naked in the lives of men.”
But these laughing little soldiers don’t matter to me.
      The only thing that counts is this body, whose blood I shed
to uncover a nest of red bees,
all busy drinking at the river of drunk women.
 
      The very ones we love so much!
Those who are the air’s nacelles,
akin to beheaded owls
whose heads revolve.
Those named angels
because they are as learned as demons.
 
      Their heart is a wildflower
with more petals than tears.
 
      In a tear—sometimes—
she promenades, as in a blond boat.
 
      Her food is made of dead flies
we neglected, forgetful as we are
of the acute role of Queen Geometry.
 
     This flower is the word my mouth is about to say.
Or else shut up:
for my mouth’s lock has no key.
This key is sexless, my heart beats
to see it coming,
so blue, in the great hued night.
 
 
 
2
 
      The great beasts went out by the doors of shadow.
A little later, they returned through the portal
of lèse-majesté.
 
      A large lion, drowned, was floating on the sugared water.
 
What shadowy silence on the snow palaces!
 
      From the sky a black heat was falling,
as the long pallid flies accompanied us
toward evening, sometimes taking our hands.
 
      The blue pillow was losing blood,
which flowed off in quick streams,
the lunar daisy marrying a stratum of ice.
 
       City traversed by innumerable candlesticks.
 
On the bank of violet-black,              
the beloved Dinosaur stretches out,
pulling its bedsheet up to its mouth.
 
 

3
     
      Finding them too dry,
we took them away on stretchers,
on pallets, in wheelbarrows.
On everything we found most suspect
in burning matter.
 
      We dispersed in both directions,
but not forgetting the desert rose:
it is still alive at the quays of moribund seaweed
where one last poppy shivers,           
being only the armistice of itself.  
 
      Dark was the jackal-child of the forests,
sitting in its squares of wind and grass.
 
      And dark the monkeys, sitting in melancholy:
they showed us only their foolproof gray gloves.
 
 
 
4
 
     The silver-seeded fur does not star                                              
with risky mixtures the caverns
where Being in its nightcap
opens its windblown door of black trunks.  
     A demented laugh, a blue fire circled with wasp rays
would be your eye there, oh reciprocity that always suspends you
at the threshold of rejected caves?
 
     By day, the great Lustucru, ice cyclamen, carries your steps
on his back, the hospital masked for the fête.
 
     If in your brow you develop
a lucid partridge intelligence,
still your hidden eyes will lose their asbestos hair.
A source blinder than a deaf man made of resin.
 
     Chase these trains of misery
on the flaming rails of a kiss.
The cave is made of iridescent fabric  
for those who cannot take it with Father Egypt’s fingers.
 
     A bale of ludicrous hay rears up
where our young lions will not sleep.
Here, no one has their head on backwards.
     
      The clock ticks too slowly.
Let’s die more and more!
 
      Already I have its marvelous taste
on my distant teeth.
 
 
 
HYMN TO THE GREAT UMBRELLA   
 
     I will have the death I wanted,
with its yellow-iron lace, its car jacks of straw.
     It will wait for me in the valley of tulle,
when the day’s only tenderness
will have made its golden serpent appearance,
gleaming a few moments when the clock strikes five.
 
     Then the magic bird, overcome by a houppelande of revolt,
will make its pearl sonnet with words of wet rattles
under the wind.
     The sun will not shine to attest
to my thinness with its shadow.
 
     Go, my fine horses!
Hoist me onto your granite shoulders.
Chain my wrists, already chilled:
at dusk, the forest opens like a bunch of red beans
and the stream of strong blue wine awaits me.
    
     Silence opens its doors, for once they are liquid,       
as if surrounded by the mouths of night.
    
     The very last white boar that I will frighten
turns its back.
 
     Let the searchers move away.
It is not a young boy’s body I will leave,
head in the stream, feet of mother-of-pearl vermeil,
 
     in the form of a Great Umbrella.