None objected.
One night, he galloped high in his saddle. A Genie appeared, of ineffable, inexpressible beauty. His face and bearing suggested a complex, multifaceted love; unspeakable—even unbearable—happiness! The Prince and the Genie vanished into each other, completely. How could they not have died of it? They died together.
But the Prince passed away in his palace, at a routine age. The Prince was the Genie. The Genie was the Prince.
Our desires lack an inner music.
Muscle-bound goons. The kind that rape the world. Self-satisfied, in no hurry to devote their remarkable faculties to understanding another’s mind. Such wise men. Stares as blank as summer nights, red and black, tricolored, golden star-stung steel: twisted features, leaden, pale, inflamed; hoarse guffaws. A grim onslaught of pretense. To hear what these kids would say about Cherubino in their rough voices and violent ways. They’re heading to town to get it from behind, all decked out in sickening luxury.
A violent Paradise of runaway sneers! But no match for your Fakirs and hackneyed theatrics. In costumes sewn together with all the taste of a nightmare, they strut through assorted laments, tragedies filled with all every brigand and demigod missing from religion and history. Chinese, Hottentots, bohemians, fools, hyenas, Molochs, ancient lunacies, sinister demons—they slip savage slaps and tickles into your mother’s old chestnuts. A little avant-guarde here, some three-hankie stuff there. Master jugglers who use riveting comedy to transform players and scenes. Eyes ignite, blood sings, bones stretch, tears and red rivulets run. Their clowning can last minutes, or months.
Only I have the key to this savage sideshow.
Graceful son of Pan! Beneath your flower- and berry-crowned brow, the precious spheres of your eyes revolve. Your wine-stained cheeks seem hollow. Your fangs gleam. Your chest is a lyre, music flows from your pale arms. Your heart beats in a belly where two sexes sleep. At night, wander, softly moving this thigh, then this other thigh, and this left leg.
Out of the snow rises a Beautiful Being. Whisperings of death and rounds of unheard music lift this worshipped shape, make it expand and tremble like a ghost; black and scarlet wounds colonize immaculate flesh. Life’s colors deepen, dance, and radiate from this Vision fresh off the blocks. Tremors rise and rumble, and the wild flavor of these effects is outdone by mortal whisperings and raucous music that the distant world hurls upon our mother of beauty: she pulls back, she rears. Oh! Our bones are draped in amorous new flesh.
O the ashen face, the coarse thatch, the crystal arms! The cannon I collapse upon, through a topple of trees and soft air.
Being Beauteous: Rimbaud’s title for this poem was in English, as given.
O the vast avenues of the holy land, the terraces of the temple. What became of the Brahman who taught me the Proverbs? From then, from there, I still see images, even of old women. I remember hours of silver and sun along rivers, the hand of the land upon my shoulder, and our caresses in the fragrant fields.
1 comment