Today, the universe is splendid—
Without death, without hope, without brides,
We are grooms of a horse drunk on wine,

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

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

Rain falls, fails to irrigate the entire town.
Urged by grandiloquence—or tenebrous cold—
the pale inhabitants of our neighbors’ graveyard

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

I am like the king of a rainy kingdom,
rich but weak, young yet very old,
who, with perceptions piqued by marigolds

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

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