Prose

for Des Esseintes

Hyperbole! from memory

Triumphal you can never glad

Rise up, book of spells today

In a book of iron clad:

For I install, by means of science,

The hymn of all hearts spiritual

In the work of my own patience,

Atlas, herbals and rituals.

We our face took for a walk

(We were two, I maintain)

Upon landscapes with charms chock-a-block,

O sister, all of yours comparing.

The era of authority’s troubled

When, motiveless, they start to say

Of this noontime that our double

Unconsciousness gets deeper nay

That, hundred-irised ground, its site,

They know if it really has been,

Bears nohow the name that’s cited

In the gold of Summer’s trumpet.

Yes, on an isle whose air burdened

More with sight than visioning

Each flower wider more unfurled

Without a need for our discussing.

Such, immense, that every one

Ordinarily decked itself out

With a lucid contour, lacuna,

That from gardens marked it out.

Glory of long desire, Ideas

All in me exulting saw

The family of irises

Unto this new duty grow,

But that sister wise and tender

Would not let her glance go far

Past smiling and, to comprehend her

I take up my ancient care.

Oh! know litigious Spirit then,

At this hour of our silence,

That of multiple lilies the stem

Arose much too vast for our reasons

And not as sheds a tear the shore,

When its game monotonous lies

Wanting there to be yet more

Amidst my youthfulest surprise

At hearing heaven and the charts

Endlessly borne out by my steps,

By the very wave that parts,

That this land existed never.

The child abdicates ecstasy

And already learnéd in the realms

She says the word: Anastasius!

Born for everlasting vellums,

Before a sepulcher guffaw

Under any climate, its gramps,

At bearing this name: Pulcheria!

Hid by too tall a gladiolus.

Stéphane Mallarmé