The Friday Poem on 01/11/2024
The rolling phrases here incorporate and respond to Rimbaud‘s prose poem ‘Ville’ (XV of Illuminations). Intense feeling surges through the lines, where French and English merge, and repetition drives the emotion (“city”, “love”, “night”, “care”, “desperate”, désespéré). Coeur and “care” are half-rhymes, while nuit, notre and “night” alliterate. Many words (“revelation”, “simple”, “expression,” “possible”, “strangers”, “spectres”) are identical in both languages and call to each other across the centuries. But the chosen form is a sonnet, a time-honoured vehicle for love. Most sonnets are inspired by people, not cities. But this is certainly a love poem.
Un Amour Désespéré
An evening like this, to carry Rimbaud’s Ville
in my palms— my dear, unreliable, beating city
and sky, my emblem of night. La morale et la langue
sont réduites à leur plus simple expression, enfin!
Great waves will be crashing on the dark-sapphire shore
of this city at night. New furies will blossom and open
like blue wounds in the coal-fractured shadow of stars—
notre ombre des bois, notre nuit d’été! A revelation—
that it was possible— to love like this, even here, even
in this nightfall traversed by strangers— ces millions de gens
qui n’ont pas besoin de se connaître— to love like this—
to be so desperate— to watch the spectres breathing smoke
into the streets preoccupied with crime and death— et tout mon cœur—
and care so much, care so desperately for this place.
