The streets are full of lilacs that trail long swirls and eddies of fragrance arabesques of fragrance like the arabesques that form and fade in the fleeting ripples of the jade-green river.

Porte Maillot

V

 As a gardener in a pond splendid with lotus and Indian nenuphar wades to his waist in the warm black water stooping to this side and that to cull the snaky stems of the floating white glittering lilies groping to break the harsh stems of the imperious lotus lifting the huge flowers high       in a cluster in his hand till they droop against the moon; so I grope through the streets of the night culling out of the pool of the spring-reeking, rain-reeking city gestures and faces.

 Place St. Michel

VI TO A. K. MC C. 

 This is a garden where through the russet mist of clustered trees and strewn November leaves, they crunch with vainglorious heels of ancient vermillion the dry dead of spent summer's greens, and stalk with mincing sceptic steps and sound of snuffboxes snapping to the capping of an epigram, in fluffy attar-scented wigs ... the exquisite Augustans.

 Tuileries

VII

They come from the fields flushed carrying bunches of limp flowers they plucked on teeming meadows and moist banks scented of mushrooms.

They come from the fields tired softness of flowers in their eyes and moisture of rank sprouting meadows.

 They stroll back with tired steps lips still soft with the softness of petals voices faint with the whisper of woods; and they wander through the darkling streets full of stench of bodies and clothes and merchandise full of the hard hum of iron things; and into their cheeks that the wind had burned and the sun that kisses burned out on the rustling meadows into their cheeks soft with lazy caresses comes sultry caged breath of panthers fetid, uneasy fury of love sprouting hot in the dust and stench of walls and clothes and merchandise, pent in the stridence of the twilight streets.

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