The Milk Bowl of Feathers by Mary Ann Caws

Author:Mary Ann Caws
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2018-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Translated by Mary Ann Caws

“Vanity, Memory of the Swan,” from Robert Desnos, “The Night of Loveless Nights” (1930).

No, Love Is Not Dead

No, love is not dead in this heart and these eyes and this mouth which announced the beginning of its burial.

Listen, I have had enough of the picturesque and the colorful and the charming.

I love love, its tenderness and cruelty.

My love has but one name, but one form.

All passes. Mouths press against this mouth.

My love has but one name, but one form.

And if some day you remember

O form and name of my love,

One day on the ocean between America and Europe,

At the hour when the last sunbeam reverberates on the ­undulating surface of waves, or else a stormy night beneath a tree in the countryside or in a speeding car,

A spring morning on the boulevard Malesherbes,

A rainy day,

At dawn before sleeping,

Tell yourself, I command your familiar spirit, that I alone loved you more and that it is sad you should not have known it.

Tell yourself one must not regret things: Ronsard before me and Baudelaire have sung the regrets of ladies old or dead who despised the purest love.

When you are dead

You will be lovely and still an object of desire.

I will be already gone, enclosed forever complete within your immortal body, in your astonishing image present forever among the constant marvels of life and of eternity, but if I live

Your voice and its tone, your look and its radiance,

Your fragrance and the scent of your hair and many other things beside will still live in me,

Who am neither Ronsard nor Baudelaire,

I who am Robert Desnos and who for having known and loved you,

Am easily their equal.

I who am Robert Desnos, to love you

Wanting no other reputation for my memory on the despicable earth.

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