Wintry Shiver

That Saxony clock, which runs slow and strikes thirteen amidst its flowers and its gods, whose has it been? Think it has come from Saxony by long diligences in the past.

(Some singular shadows hang on the worn glass panes.)

And your Venice mirror, deep as a frigid fountain, in a shoreline of giltless wyverns, who has gazed into it? Ah! I am sure that more than one woman has bathed in that water the sin of her beauty; and perhaps I would see a naked phantom if I looked a long time.

—Villain, you are always saying bad things.

(I see spiders’ webs atop the tall casements.)

Our sideboard again is very old: contemplate how this fire reddens its sad wood; the dulled curtains are its age, and the tapestry of the armchairs bare of paint, and the ancient prints on the walls, and all our old-fashioned things? Does it not seem to you, even, that the waxbills and the bluebird have faded with time?

(Don’t reflect upon the spiders’ webs trembling atop the tall casements.)

You love all that and that is why I can live next to you. Have you not desired, my sister with the glance of times past, that in one of my poems there should appear these words “the grace of things faded”? New things displease you; in you also, they cause fear with their loud boldness, and you would feel the need to outwear them, which is quite difficult to do for those who do not taste action.

Come, close your old German almanach, which you read with attention, even though it appeared more than a hundred years ago and the kings it announces are all dead, and, upon the antique carpet stretched, my head upheld amidst your charitable knees in your pallid dress, o tranquil child, I shall speak to you for hours; there are no more fields and the streets are empty, I shall speak to you of our furniture... You are distracted?

(Those spiders’ webs quiver atop the tall casements.)

Stéphane Mallarmé