Long After
(To N.)

Baudelaire

Wine can lend an atmosphere of luxury to even
The filthiest hovel, conjure the porticoes of heaven
From the vaporous red-gold of its bouquet,
Like a sunset in a clouded sky; opium, that magnifies
Every little thing, abolishes space-time and defies

The limit put on the infinite by our feeble senses,
Brings a new depth to the pleasures it enhances
And fills the soul to overflowing with a sombre joy …
None of it is equal, though, to the poison that pours
From those terrifying, fatal green eyes of yours,

Those lakes in which my soul trembles, sees itself reversed —
My dreams flock to those bitter depths to quench their thirst.
And none of this equals the prodigal wonder of
Your juices, gnawing at my unrepentant soul, plunging it
In forgetfulness, vertigo, the brink of death, the pit ….

Strange goddess, your smell a mix of Havana
And something musky, a voodoo fetish from the Savannah
Created by some witch-doctor Faust,
Sorceress with sun-warmed flanks, and long-lost daughter
To antipodean midnights: the best wine is water,

The best opium harmless compared to your lips
That love dances on; when desire’s caravanserai slips
From its camp at dawn and sets out towards you,
Your eyes are the oasis where even boredom drowns;
From those vast skylights on your soul, shadowed by frowns,

Pitiless, you pour liquid fire. I can’t take much more
But neither can I get my tongue around your shore
Nine times, like the Styx, nor can I, hungry Megaera,
Be Proserpine in the hell of your bed, break you
And bring you to heel; and nor can I make you,

Or your heavy, henna’d hair, a censer in the gloom
Of an alcove, release a less primitive, untamed perfume,
The spell that’s cast over the present by the past —
It’s the same as when some adoring lover plucks
Memory’s exquisite flower from the flesh he fucks ….

When you have your silks on (mother-of-pearl),
You might be dancing, just walking along; you curl
And uncurl, you undulate like one of the snakes
At the end of a fakir’s stick — but even more than that,
Even more than your oneness with the eye and fur of my cat

You mirror the endless desert sky, the empty sands
With their vast indifference to what we suffer at the hands
Of gods and men; and the deep sea-swell and the tides
And everything they offer up and take back again:
You’ve simply evolved, ignorant, insouciant, inane,

Inhuman, with a mineral glint in your eye that links
The inviolate angel with the Egyptian Sphinx;
A steely glitter, the gleam of gold and diamond mines
Where like a star that scintillates pointlessly and dies
The childless woman’s majesty forever shines.

 

Neruda

I could write the saddest lines tonight.
Could write ‘The night is full of stars’, for instance,

‘and they tremble, the blue stars, in the distance.’
The night wind whirls about the sky and sings.

I could write the saddest lines tonight.
I loved her and sometimes she loved me back.

It’s true, on nights like this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her — how many times? — beneath the skies,

Never-ending. She loved me, sometimes I loved her back.
Who would not have loved those grey-green eyes?

I could write the saddest lines tonight.
To think I do not have her. To know that I have lost her.

To listen to the night, more immense without her.
Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grasses.

What does it matter that my love was not enough to keep her?
The night is full of stars, and she is not with me.

That’s all. In the distance someone’s singing. In the distance.
But I can’t be at peace now, having lost her.

As if to get her back, my gaze goes searching for her.
My heart goes searching for her, and she is not with me.

The night, the same night that whitens the same trees.
The people we were then, we are no longer.

I no longer love her, it’s true, but how I loved her.
My voice goes searching on the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else. She will be someone else’s. As before my kisses.
Her voice. Her body, obviously. Her heavy-lidded eyes.

I no longer love her, it’s true. But perhaps I do love her.
Love is so short, and it’s so long, oblivion.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms
I can’t be at peace now, having lost her.

Although this may be the last time she hurts me
And these may be the last lines I write her.

 

Genet

That slippery mollusc, sloping bivalve,
Its pale pink fronds and mother-of-pearl, its pearls,
Its lips as neat, as delicate as a girl’s
That offered both the torment and the salve …
Now a compact has been worked out between
It, or your mouth, and this other guy’s cock:
A fisherman of eighteen or nineteen
In blue shorts — and always hard as a rock.

You force the sap up through that tender bough
With your hands, as his hands kindle in you
The clear flame that burns a pine-and-ice-like blue,
The flame that he and he alone knows how
To put out — with his sudden spurt and splash
Of spunk. No, don’t go yet. But he pulls out
And night engulfs you, while the moon-white flash
Of foam in his eyes shows how deep the doubt

That lives in both of you; the foam on his lips
Is some sort of prize, and precious. He goes home
To the sea-floor, while the tide with its foam
Comes in, goes out, and he has come to grips
With the rose of your past, and plundered it —
Its petals scattered to the winds and water.
He has plundered your arse and its perfumed shit,
Your breath and your leggings and your daughter.

Nights, my fisherman came down out of the blue
Houses, and my arms like branches held him tight.
He smiled. The sea snared our four feet and drew
Us on. At his belt, hung there by knots of tight
Drenched hair, a bunch of heads were dangling — the heads
(And how his studded belt gleamed in the moonlight)
Of eight sullen girls surprised that they were dead.
He admired himself in the mirror of night …

So you lie alone, forgotten by him when
He’s sleeping (you lie in the crook of his arm).
You dare not move. Outside, the sea is calm.
If he should wake and look at you — what then?
What if — worse than his leaving you in dreams —
He threw up on your tits? Would you pick through
The wine and meat and bile, the violet streams
And bits of rose that dissolve his ties to you?

Note: The Neruda is indebted to a translation by Alistair Gale that was a prizewinner in the Times/Stephen Spender translation awards some years ago, for which I was one of the judges. For the Genet I referred to Edmund White’s translation of ‘The Fisherman of Suquet’, which White undertook for his acclaimed biography of Genet, published in 1993. Of course no one but myself is to blame for my versions of these, or of Baudelaire.