Long ago cloisters had the sacred Truth
of Holy Scripture painted on their walls.
These pictures warmed the hearts of men of faith
and eased the chill inside their stringent cells.

I still recall the little whitewashed lodging where
we lived in peace, just off a major thoroughfare.

After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a silver two-franc piece he inspected closely. I wondered about this odd distribution of coins.

You must get drunk. That’s it: your sole imperative. To immunize yourself from the backbreaking, body-bending burdens of time, you must get drunk and stay that way.

I am like the king of a rainy kingdom,
rich but weak, young yet very old, 

Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust
torment our bodies and possess our minds,
and we sustain our affable remorse

It is a legacy of Tuscan skill;
see how the holy sisters, Power and Grace,
sustain this woman’s beauty in a form

The sun is all very well when it rises—then
who minds returning its abrupt salute?
But fortunate the man who still can find

My darling was naked, or nearly, for knowing my heart
she had left on her jewels, the bangles and chains
whose jingling music gave her the conquering air

No chest of drawers crammed with documents,
love-letters, wedding-invitations, wills,
a lock of someone’s hair rolled up in a deed,

Late in this cruel season when the sun
scourges alike the city and the fields,
parching the stubble and sinking into slums

Dreams come now, bad dreams, and teenage boys
burrow into their pillows. Now the lamp
that glowed at midnight seems, like a bloodshot eye,

Pascal had his abyss, it followed him.
But the abyss is All—action and dream,
language, desire!—and who could count the times

Ecstatic fleece that ripples to your nape
and reeks of negligence in every curl!
To people my dim cubicle tonight

Worshipped once, discreetly, by our sires
as Cynthia, the lamp of secret haunts,
and still attended through blue landscapes by

Once, indulgent lady—only once
  you lay your lustrous arm
on mine (against the darkness of my soul

Behave, my Sorrow! let’s have no more scenes.
Evening’s what you wanted—Evening’s here:
a gradual darkness overtakes the town,

It is a terrible terrain
  no mortal eye has seen
whose image still seduces me

Remember, my soul, the thing we saw
  that lovely summer day?
On a pile of stones where the path turned off,

Two warriors have engaged in combat: swords
Hash and clash together; blood is spilled.
Such passages of arms are the result

I prize the memory of naked ages when
Apollo relished gilding marble limbs
whose agile-fleshed originals achieved

Have you felt—I have—a pain that you enjoyed?
Do they say about you, too: “How strange he is!”
—I was dying, and a special agony

You used to be jealous of our old nurse
who sleeps, warm heart and all, beneath the sod.
We ought to bring her flowers, even so.

Gentle reader, being—as you are—
a cautious man of uncorrupted tastes,
lay aside this disobliging work,