pitch-smeared flanks, to my nose a smell of bales and merchandise the wet familiar smell of harbors and the old arousing fragrance making the muscles ache and the blood seethe and the eyes see the roadsteads and the golden beaches where with singing they would furl the sails of the schooners of childish dreams.

On icegreen seas of sunset the moon skims like a curved white sail:       had I forgotten the fragrance of old dreams that the smell from the anchored barges can so fill my blood with bitterness that the sight of the scudding moon makes my eyes tingle with salt tears?

 In the ship's track on the infertile sea now many childish bodies float rotting under the white moon.

 Quai des Grands Augustins

XI Lua cheia esta noit

 Thistledown clouds cover the whole sky scurry on the southwest wind over the sea and islands; somehow in the sundown the wind has shaken out plumed seed of thistles milkweed asphodel, raked from off great fields of dandelions their ghosts of faded golden springs and carried them in billowing of mist to scurry in moonlight out of the west.

 They hide the moon the whole sky is grey with them and the waves.

 They will fall in rain over country gardens where thrushes sing.

They will fall in rain down long sparsely lighted streets hiss on silvery windowpanes moisten the lips of girls leaning out to stare after the footfalls of young men who splash through the glimmering puddles with nonchalant feet.

They will slap against the windows of offices where men in black suits shaped like pears rub their abdomens against frazzled edges of ledgers.

 They will drizzle over new-plowed fields wet the red cheeks of men harrowing and a smell of garlic and clay will steam from the new-sowed land and sharp-eared young herdsmen will feel in the windy rain lisp of tremulous love-makings interlaced soundless kisses impact of dead springs nuzzling tremulous at life in the red sundown.

Shining spring rain O scud steaming up out 

 Prev. P 49/51 next