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ARIANE - WAXEN BEAUTY
Oh but you are beautiful, Ariane, my sun beneath the moon,
Coming back from an exile, that must have been where you were born
Since I never saw you,
But I sensed your existence as one senses at sunset
The existence of the dawn,
And here you are rising from the depths of our listlessness
From the desert sands,
Waters of the night, clouds of the future
But you are also a memory of the past since everywhere
In everything I sought your face,
In the countenance of the day, on the lips of the morning,
On discovering fragrance, earthly fragrance,
At the turn of the seasons, in frozen springs,
The wild, flying hair of skies seen mirrored in water,
and now I've found you at the corner of a street, condemned
by the frigidity of a shadow cast by the antarctic,
in the sad echoing of footsteps heavy with lonely passion,
I found you, bird in the oasis,
wood pigeon singing in a palm tree.
Ariane, O my soul, you are everything I love, lying underneath
Everything I don't love,
Truth, naked, a column of milk leaping up from the bubbling
Sulphur springs of reason,
Those cold formulae and tepid
Scientific calculations -
I was in the labyrinth and you were in me,
My youth followed the river to the spring
Right to you I came, my breath hanging by a thread
Hanging on your breath,
My lips of flesh and blood will kiss your lips of wax,
O waxen figure, you, frozen, cold,
Bearing an appearance of life, O pure one born faultlessly
From the work of bees roaming through the limetrees,
Wax with a smile of honey,
All the more alive through having been born
Motionless, for being
Only an appearance,
Since every beat of the heart will cease
And all truth is all too soon
Swallowed up in death.
A star shone in the window of a hairdresser's shop.
O the origin of miracles,
Venus clothed in art rises from out of a milky sea,
She is born,
And now on this beach she assumes
A permanent form, O the genesis of love.
In a dead seashell you can hear
All the sounds of life -
So the wandering attention of innocence
Stops transfixed by the firefly that has dropped
From Heaven on a shop window display, in the midst
Of hair curlers, make-up, ribbons
And once again the Universe has found its tongue
- Enchanted lips leave marks on the glass
Like so many traces of naked
Footsteps in the sand.
And he who loves Ariane, who loves himself,
What is his name? Is it David, son of David the King?
Ulysses, son of Ulysses the traveller?
Emmanuel, son of Him who has no name,
Bebert, son of Bebert, of the Place Maubert,
Or you, poet, born without father or mother,
Lover of the beauty that walks in the secret
Corridors of the soul,
And hears the voice of his most intimate love
As once he used to hear
The birds of the air?
For there is nothing you can imagine that does not assume a life
And, born of your flight, take off
On a flight of its own.