|
|
|
|
LOVE
SONG Translation by Mark Spitzer |
Un
Chant d'amour by Jean Genet |
|
To Lucien Sénémaud SHEPHERD, descend from the sky of your sleeping ewes! (beautiful Winter, I surrender you to the down of a shepherd) If your sex is still frosted beneath my breath dawn undoes it from this fragile dress. Is it a question of loving at sunrise? Their songs still sleep in the throats of herdsmen. Let's open our curtains on this marble decor: Your dumbstruck face sprinkled with sleep. Oh your grace overwhelms me, I'm blacking out beautiful vessel dressed for the wedding of the Isles and the evening. High yardarm! Hard insult oh my black continent, my dress of vast grief! Angry golden clusters, an instant out of God (He breathes and falls asleep) lightened from returning you. Aided by your hand, I believe the sky descends and tenderly lays its white gloves on our eyes. Its softness, above all, isolates you and scatters this November rain on your delicate brow. Twilight of dawn what shadow, what Africa envelops your members where a serpent dwells? Leaf, waltz in reverse. Fogs, stray. To what tree do you tie this scarf flower of the wind? My finger breaks the frost on the wood of your harp Girl of the rushes standing, hair parted. On the brim of my cap a sprig of hazel hung awry tickles my ear. In your neck I hear a sputtering bird. My horses sleep upright in the path. Caressing the shoulder of the sea my eye distracted (my sandal wet with the wing unstitched) I feel my swollen hand on your mossy heat fill with white flocks unseen in the air. From your hip to your neck, my lambs go to graze to browse through fine grass burnt from the sun flowering acacias roll in your voice the bee will steal the honey of their echoes. But the green flag of the prowlers of death must watch over somewhere and catch itself in the poles and shake the night, the azure while dusting your shoulders and piercing your sand-buried feet with streams of air. In order for me to climb again naked on blue stairways solemn and sinking in these dream-waves weary of perishing forever inches from my lips the horizon fell asleep in your folded arms. Your naked arms will whinny, quartering my night. Damien, these dark horses disembowel deep water. Centaurs born from the belly take me galloping away. But if sleep flees me the arms of a dying negro. I have adorned their horse nostrils with roses, with ribbons and the hair of stripped girls I have wanted to caress their sunlit dresses my arm outstretched above the stream: Your stubborn shoulder has rejected my hand: it dries up deserted on my docile wrist: the hastening hand chopped off in vain (five fingers of a thief with carmine nails) is now more agile. So many hands on the edges of paths and woods! Close to your neck, the heel of my hand loved living naked but hardly became a monster to your eyes I will kiss your fingers in mine. Shot at by surprise a soldier smiles at me with a trellis of blood on the whitewashed wall. The shred of a discourse caught in the branches and in the grass a hand on rotting toes. I speak of a country flayed to the bone. France, with perfumed eyes, you are our image as sweet as her nights, maybe even more oh France, and like them wounded by words falling short. Slow ceremony to the sound of twenty muffled drums. Nude cadavers paraded through the town. Beneath the moon a brass band files by at the time of plowing in our wooded vales. Poor hand bound to melt! You still leap in the grass. From a wound or the blood of stones? Who can be born, what page and what angel of ivy chokes me? What soldier bearing your dead nails? Should I lay myself at these feet uncurling the sea? Beautiful love story: a child of the village saves the errant sentinel on the beach where the amber of my hand attracts an iron lad! In his torso, asleep -- in a strange way creamy almond star, oh curled up little girl -- This tolling of the blood in the path's azure is the evening's bare foot sounding on my lawn. This form that keeps you so pure is of a rose. Preserve it. The evening already reveals you and you appear to me (all clothes removed) wrapped in your sheets or standing against a wall. At the edge of this badly shaken brimming petal my lip dares to gather a falling tear its milk swells my neck like a flight of doves. oh remain a rose with a pearl on the petal. Spiny fruit of the sea, your rays flay me but the fine nail of the evening can split your rind. My pink tongue drinks at these edges full force. If my heart inside the gold of a false chignon should founder while anchored alive without being able to vomit itself into a sea of bile harnessed to your sex then I wander motionless in great strides this world without kindness where you see me sleep. I roll beneath the sea and your wave above fashions axles twisted by your storms yet I will go far for the sky at work with the thread of the horizon has sewn me in a sheet. Around your house I prowl without hope. My sad whip hangs from my neck. I watch through the shutters your beautiful eyes those arbors, those palaces of foliage where evening will die. Whistle dirty songs strut around looking tough! Your brood-crushing heel in the rushes carves the April morning air with gilded shells in the wind flogging the azure. But see that it doesn't plummet and shed at your feet oh star, my bright supporter in the most fragile nights between the lace and snow of these isles: your shoulders gold and white the finger of the almond tree. |
Vont paître mes agneaux de
ta hanche à ton cou, |