Delirium (16 page)

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 seen the things man thought he saw and knew.

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 dragge
d 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,

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 whi
ch 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.