Changing one’s perception of the world should be as easy as switching programmes on a television set. Now I am in a meadow, now I am in a street, sunflowers brushing my neck, now I am floating through the sky... I can be anywhere through a modulation of psychic energy.
Rimbaud comes into focus again. His lip is split; blood is caked on his right index finger. A loop of saliva is twisted around his collar. Did he have a fit, back there off the road? His eyes are hugely dilated. Maybe he is perturbed with what I have just written. He wants to pulp the paragraph with his raw fist. Where does anything come from and why?
I can repeat it, only differently. Rimbaud is at the London docks, sitting by himself watching the commerce on the river. Blue, brown and grey river and sky colours mingle. A shaft of sunlight crosses his left knee. His right profile is in shadow. He is thinking that poetry has ruined him. It is while focusing on the naked torso of a West Indian docker that he decides his life lies elsewhere, that man’s back will remain the source of his decision. He has thought into its hollow. He has watched the subtle kundalini of the spine. He has suffered for the animal labour of the man. He will never know his name, and yet their lives intersected at a crucial point.
Rimbaud comes into focus again. This time his skin is blistered black from the desert sun. He is emaciated; his body is like a junkie’s. No flesh on the bones. His face hollowed in to follow the bone structure of the skull. He carries a gun. He would blow the back out of anything. He would like to shoot the image of him I carry in my head.
*
Rimbaud and the Sand Leopard
Jeremy Reed
Wind spitting the red sand in my eyes my mouth.
The poems I wrote on the desert’s face
are gone: the bitty black grains pour
into another undulating dune.
The sun’s too close. I hear it roar at noon.
The road I took from Tajoura to Ankober
still burns up molten in my head.
The camels whistle; packs loaded with arms.
The shrunken salt lake’s stagnant bed
contains another holocaustal sun,
and when I woke at night the flames were red
in which my poems burnt. They thought me mad
and pointed to nothing but sand,
no ash, no scattered books, no char:
the morning star.
The girl I brought from the interior
to console me in the ferocious waste
of youth and time, changed into a white sand leopard,
and stalked me, an assassin or a mirage,
hot breath and claws opening my chest at night,
and in the morning, blood-spots on the floor,
my body thin as a hollow bamboo,
my eyes punched in by the drilling white light.
And Djami, he alone
hears how the poem sings from a hot stone.
A snake drinks from my leather mouth;
and are we moving again? always South
into the sun’s eye. Vultures, warring tribes.
My leg an amputated bone.
I think if I went out into the dawn
the leopard’s tongue might lick me clean
before the kill. In death I’ll meet the youth
who wrote my poems; the one with mop-hair
I left crumpled with rage in our provincial square.
The versions of Rimbaud which follow are intended as imitations, in the sense that Robert Lowell employed the term, and not as literal translations.
J.R.
The Drunken Boat
(Le Bateau ivre)
No longer guided by haulers, I felt
the current chase me down sluggish rivers.
Yelping redskins had made human targets,
nailed them to stakes and cut out their livers.
I was indifferent to every crew,
carriers of English cottons, Flemish wheat.
My haulers dead, the uproars extinguished,
the waters left me to a steady beat.
Last winter, more dumbstruck than a child’s mind
I ran into the ferocious rip-tides.
The surf lashed me; loosened peninsulas
were like white thunder smashing at my sides.
The storm celebrated my sea vigils.
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves,
the big rollers which distribute the drowned.
Ten nights. Lighthouses marking sailors’ graves.
Sweeter than waspish apples to children,
the green water oozed through my pinewood hull,
scouring the vomit splashes and blue wine.
Rudder and planks were gashed by a sea-bull.
Later, I found the Poem of the Sea,
infused with starlight and latescent spray,
and nosed through green azure where a drowned man
rolled up and down and sometimes seemed to stay.
It’s there, the bitter red of love ferments,
stronger than alcohol, madder than lyres,
slow rhythms heard around the break of day
light up the deep blue with delirium’s fires.
I’ve known skies split by lightnings, waterspouts,
surf and the looping currents, evening too,
and dawn exalted like a flock of doves.
I’ve watched the low sun packed with mystic scars,
its long violet clots burning out in space,
resembling manic actors on the boards,
waves running blinds up across the surface.
I’ve dreamt of a green night with dazzled snows,
a kiss rising from the deeps to the sky,
the circulation of all unknown saps,
yellow and blue phosphor singing in the sea’s eye.
I’ve followed in gestative months the swell
running like hysterical cows to smash
their violent panic on the reefs. I’ve sensed
the snouting sea-herd stilled by a star’s flash.
I’ve struck against amazing Floridas
where flowers are panther’s eyes in human skin,
and rainbows dropped down as the bridle reins
keeping the glaucous sea-horizons in.
I’ve seen enormous swamps ferment, fish traps
where a Leviathan rots on the beach.
Water avalanching out of a calm,
cataracts shrieking in their overreach!
Glaciers, silver suns, waves shot through red,
I’ve seen wrecks in brown gulfs, stood upside-down,
and giant serpents devoured by vermin smoke
with black scent in a knotted tree crown.
I should have liked to point out to children
gold dolphins singing as they broke the wave,
while spindrift flowers jostled my driftings,
and winds beat like wings over the sea’s grave.
Sometimes a victim, coursing between poles,
the sea whose groundswell lifted with the breeze
carried black flowers with yellow suckers
and dragged me like a woman on her knees...
Almost an island, with its squalling birds
high over beaches, I rocked on the deep,
or sailed on, seeing through my smashed rigging
drowned men somersault backwards into sleep.
I ran, a boat conversant with sea-caves,
blasted by the storm into birdless air;
I whose sodden boards, taking in water,
would have attracted no one to its flare.
Free, smoking and risen from violet fogs,
I who bored through the red sky like a wall
carried preserves for good poets, blue jam,
azure snot, sunlight fattened to a ball.
I shot, speckled with small electric moons,
a wild plank, black sea-horses by my side,
&nbs
p; while July furnaced down burning funnels
and ultramarine skies fumed in the tide...
I who trembled, hearing on the skyline,
rampant Behemoths, a whirlpool’s shut eye,
spun on blue spaces, longing for Europe,
its parapets crowding into the sky.
I’ve seen spiral galaxies and islands
whose delirious skies open out to death.
And from those bottomless nights, golden birds,
will you rise at last on the future’s breath?
But truly I’ve known too much pain. The dawns
are inconsolable, the moon a scar,
love’s left me disconnected, spaced on drugs,
I need to sink rock bottom, go that far.
If there’s one water in Europe I need,
it’s the black cold pool where a child will try
sometimes at evening to launch a toy boat,
its structure lighter than a butterfly.
I can no longer, lit up by the surf,
sit in the wake of cotton boats, nor keep
appointment with riotous flags, nor dive
under prison ships steering for the deep.
Vowels
(Voyelles)
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue:
I shall tell of vowels and their arcane birth.
A, black brilliance of flies matting the earth,
fidgeting around stench, and out of view
the shadow gulfs. E, white vapours and tents,
glacier splinters, snow-kings, cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, lips inquiringly
framed in a smile or drunken indictment.
U, cycles, the vibration of green seas,
serene meadows dotted with cows, or lines
mapped on a forehead versed in alchemy;
O, a trumpet shrieking out of deep skies,
the void in which planets and angels shine.
— O Omega, the violet ray from his eyes.
The Sleeper in the Valley
(Le Dormeur du val)
A green hollow, the river’s voice points there,
and seethes through grasses, madly pawing free
in silver tatters. The sun fires the air
above the mountain; rays flood the valley.
A young soldier lies open mouthed, head back,
pillowed on a bed of blue watercress,
asleep, where tall ferns overcrowd the track.
The sun-warmed grass affords him ease from stress.
His feet thrust in red flowers, he sleeps. His smile
is like a sick child’s, it is infantile.
He is stone-cold, nail-heads flash from his soles.
Flower scents no longer break into his rest,
he sleeps in sunlight, one hand on his breast.
In his right side are two red bullet-holes.
Seven-year-old Poets
(Les Poëtes de sept ans)
Dutifully shutting up the copy-book,
the mother, with a proud and imperious look,
ignored her child’s contemptuous disdain,
his blue eyes flashing, his face scored with spots.
All day he studied in a sweat, and crammed,
but through his effortless facility
dark fissures showed; a sour hypocrisy.
In corridors, their mildewed papers blotched
by damp, he’d stick his tongue out, and fists jammed
into his groin, see lights behind his eyes
reveal a pattern. When a door opened
admitting lamplight, they could see him high
on the stairway, contained and out-of reach...
In summer, cowed, complacent like a fish
he’d meditate in the latrines and wish
he was a hermit on a coral beach.
In winter, he’d lie up behind the house,
buried in clay, feet stretched against a wall
and watch a cold moon whiten the garden.
He’d force his eyes until visions appeared,
and hear the creak of rotten trellises.
The friends he chose as his accomplices
were stringy, poor, pink-eyed and cretinous,
who hid yellow and black grubby fingers
coated with mud in threadbare, patched-up clothes.
They spoke with gaps, these prematurely old
village idiots, and if his mother caught
him out in these friendships, and if she knew
the depths of his concern, she said nothing.
Lies come easily if your eyes are blue.
At seven he began to write novels
about lives in the desert, liberty,
forests, suns, riverbanks, wastelands. His mind
was prompted by the magazines he’d find
depicting Spanish and Italian girls
in poses that had his cheeks burn with fire.
And when, brown-eyed, short-skirted and frisky,
the little girl of eight who lived next door
would roughly jump on him without panties
and pin him in a corner, he would bite
her bottom, hold her face down to the floor
until she beat him black and blue, and he
could taste her skin. It lasted all the night.
He feared December Sundays, the ennui
of sitting with his hair greased back, reading
a Bible with its cabbage-green edges.
Nightly, dreams pushed him out on cliff-ledges;
he hated God, but loved the grimy men
he saw at evening return to suburbs,
where mad performing artists and vendors
were crowded round like monsters in a den.
He dreamt of prairies, the earth’s rising scent
and golden puberties, love on a plain
rushed by the quick wind and laid flat again.
He relished the dark things in life, and sat
in his bare shuttered room, the ceiling blue,
inhaling its sodden humidity.
The novel that he read took up the theme
of heavy ochre skies, flooded forests,
flesh-petalled flowers open in astral woods.
– Then cataclysm, collapse, vertigo,
neighbourhood noises carried from the street.
He lay stretched out on a raw canvas bale,
hunched, tense, already breaking into sail.
Faun’s Head
(Téte de faune)
In foliage, a dense green flecked with gold,
tentative leaves on fire with gorgeous flowers,
in that green heart a vivid kiss smoulders,
exploding through the sumptuous tapestry.
A startled faun abruptly shows his eyes
and bites the scarlet flowers with white teeth.
Stained as the crimson sediment of wine,
his mouth opens in laughter on a leaf.
And when he breaks for cover like a squirrel,
his outcry still vibrates in every tree,
and you can see as a bullfinch triggers
the gold woodland crown close like a whirlpool.
Saarebrück
(L’Eclatante Victoire de Saarebrück)
Loaded with blue and gold, a demigod,
the Emperor commands the middle ground,
his saddle posture’s stiff as a ramrod,
he hardly jolts when his horse paws a mound.
The conscripts group around a gilded tent
and a red cannon; they rise drowsily.
Pitou salutes the historic moment,
and greets the Emperor with ‘Victory!’
Dumanet leans on his rifle like a cane,
a peasant farmer taking stock of rain,
he shouts ‘The Emperor!’ to a stony ring
of faces, only wine would make them sing.
Boquillon, flat out in blue, shifts his butt,
and sneeringly
quips ‘Emperor of what?’
The Lice Hunters
(Les Chercheuses de poux)
The child’s head throbs; its red flush sparks with pain;
he dreams of faces behind streaming veils
before he sits up, his two big sisters
are by his bed, long fingers, silver nails.
They take the child to a dormer window;
a flower garden swims in the blue air.
The dew silvers, as they begin their search,
slow fingers probing his unruly hair.
Enticing, intimate, their breath vibrates,
its rose-scent has him shiver; now they miss,
and now they catch, he hears saliva drawn
lightly over red lips designed to kiss.
Their eyelashes beat like frenetic moths,
electric fingers set his blood on fire,
he lies submissively, his hair crackles;
beneath their sovereign nails the lice expire.
Entranced, and lazy as though dulled by wine,
or the harmonica’s deluding wail
the child feels in their caresses the first
awakenings of a future lifting sail.
On the Road
(Ma bohème — Fantaisie)
I’d take to the road, my fists thrust inside
torn pockets, my threadbare coat grown ideal.
I walked under the sky, the Muse my bride.
I dreamt of making my brilliant loves real.