LA JEUNE PARQUE THE YOUNG FATE

LAJEUNE PARQUE

(The Young Fate)

To André Gide For so many years

I have neglected the art of verse: to test out and to compel myself again, I have done this exercise which I dedicate to you. 1917

Have the Heavens formed this mass of marvels To be the dwelling place of a serpent? Pierre CORNEILLE.

WHO weeps there, if not simply the wind, at this hour Alone, with extremest diamonds?... But who weeps, So close to myself at the moment of weeping?

This hand, on these contours it dreams of caressing, In abstract obedience to some profound purpose, Waits for my weakness to dissolve into a tear, And slowly dividing the strands of my destiny, In the purest silence enlighten a broken heart. The sea-swell murmurs to me a shadow of reproach, Or retreats here below, into its rocky gorges, Like a thing disappointed having drunk bitterly, A rumour of complaint and recovering strength… What are you doing, firm, under this icy hand, And what quiverings set up in a faded leaf Recovers greenness in you, islands of my bare breasts?... I scintillate, at one with this unknown heaven… Immense clusters sparkle at my thirst for disasters.

All-powerful outsiders, inevitable stars Who deign to glimmer from your temporal distance With I know not what supernatural purity; You who plunge into mortals to the point of tears

These supreme splinters, these invincible weapons, And these yearnings towards your own eternity, I am alone with you, trembling, have forsaken My bed; and on this tidal reef maddened by marvels, I ask of my heart what sorrow awakened it, What crime of my own or upon me committed?... ... Or if the evil that tracks me encloses a dream, When (as a velvet breath flares up the gold of lamps) I am with solid arms encircling my temples, And for long my soul awaits illumination? All things? But all things are me, mistress of my flesh, Hardening with a shiver at its own strange extent, And in my gentle bonds, and my suspended blood, I have watched me watching, sinuous, and gilded With glance after glance, my own profoundest forests.

I was following a snake who came from biting me.

WHAT a coil of desires, his train!... What a jumble Of treasures being snatched away from my greediness, And what a sombre thirst for more lucidity!

O subtle ruse!... In that gleaming sorrow abandoned I sensed myself being known much more than wounded… In the most treacherous soul, a thing in me is born; The poison, my poison, enlightens as it knows me: It brings colour to a virgin absorbed in herself, Jealous... But of whom, jealous and by whom menaced? And what a silence speaks to my sole possessor?

O gods! In my heavy wound a secret sister Burns, who prefers herself to any attentiveness.

«GO! I have no more need of your native innocence, Dear Serpent... Entwined in myself, I am dizzy! Cease from offering me the puzzle of your knots Or your faithfulness which flees me even as it probes… My soul may suffice, adornment of a ruin! She knows, on my shadow astray with her agonies, At my breast, in the night, to bite at enchanting rocks;

She has suckled there for long the milk of reveries… Let slacken then the grasp of those bejewelled arms That menace with their love my spiritual fate… You can do nothing for me that will not be less cruel, Less desirable... Pacify then, calm these waves, Call back these troubled eddies, these squalid promises… My surprise is over, and my eyes are open wide. I expected no less of my lush wildernesses Than that they would give birth to a rage so entwined: Their passionate depths are made aridly brilliant The more I advance and with altered perspective See hopelessly limitless infernos of thought… I know... My weariness is at times a theatre. No mind is so pure and free from idolatry It can burn by itself with the ardour of torches Nor escape from the walls of its own mournful tomb. All is born here below of an infinite waiting. The very shade yields to a certain agony, The meagre soul half-opens, and a monster riots That writhes about itself at a threshold of fire… But, though capricious and prompt you make your appearance, Reptile, o lively curves all eager for caresses, Such all but impatience and such heavy languor, What are you, beside my night's interminable length? You watched as I slept in my beautiful negligence… But with these my perils, I am in complicity, More versatile, o Thyrsus, and more treacherous than they. Leave me! thread your slimy way back as you darkly came! Go seek out some closed eyes for your monstrous dances. Glide towards other beds with your successive skins, Hatch out on other hearts the seeds of their own evil, So that fast in the coils of your animal dream They may gasp until day in their anxious innocence!... Me, I am awake. I arise, pale and prodigious, All humid with the tears which I have left unshed, From an absence with mortal contours yet cradled By myself alone... And breaking from a serene tomb, I lean here uneasy and at once most noble, My visions so many amongst the night and the eye, The least flickering movements consulting my pride.»

BUT I trembled at the loss of a divine sorrow!

I kissed on my hand that all but invisible bite, And I knew nothing more of my insensate body That was, than a flame which was burning about my sides: Farewell, I thought, MYSELF, mortal sister, falsehood…

HARMONIOUS ME, different from a dream, Firm and flexible female of silences followed By pure acts!... Brow limpid, and ravished by waves, In as much as the wind's vague roughness can achieve, Mingling and uplifting long light strands in its flight, Speak!... I was the equal and the bride of the day, Sole smiling support that I had fashioned from love To the all-powerful altitude adoring...

What brightness on my lashes so blindly gilded, O eyelids still oppressed by a night of treasure, While I prayed as I grouped in your golden shadows! Open to the eternal which seemed to enclose me, I offered my velvet fruit for it to devour; Nothing murmured to me that a desire to die Might under the sun in this golden pulp ripen: My bitterest savour had not yet come to me. I was giving up nothing but my naked shoulder To the light; and upon this honeysweet bosom, Whose tender birth was by the heavens accomplished, There descended drowsily the pattern of the world. Then in the brilliant god, a wandering captive, Burning I rustled and trod on the fertile soil, My shadows blending and parting under the linen. Happy! At the same height as those fine-looking sheaves, Letting their downfolding leaves respond to my robe, As though in abasement of their so fragile pride; And if, reacting against this new-found freedom, If the robe is torn upon a refractory thorn, The taut curve of my body admits and proclaims it, Nude through the billowing veil of living colours Which disputes my rights and links me with the flowers!

I almost half-regret this illusory power… One with the desire, my obedience remained Imminent, tied still by habit to these burnished knees; My wishes were with such rapid movements accomplished

That I felt my cause as being scarcely more agile! Towards my luminous senses my fair clay swum, And in the fervent peace of such natural dreams, All these infinite steps appeared to me eternal. Except that, o Splendour, at my feet the enemy, My shadow! a mobile and a supple winding-sheet, Painted my absence skimming effortlessly over The earth where I was fleeing from this weightless death. Between the rose and me, I see that it is hiding; It dances in the dust, it disturbs no foliage As it glides by, but passes, and destroys everywhere… Glide by! O ship of death...

AND I live, upstanding, Hard, and by my own nothingness secretly armed, But, as when the cheek with love is ardently burning, And the nostril catches on the wind the orange-tree, I render to the day no more than a stranger's glance… Oh! to what extent may in my seeking night grow The mysterious half of my heart thus divided, And what sombre attempts at the depth of my art!... Far from pure surroundings, I am captive, and held By the disappearance of worn out fragrances, I sense beneath sunbeams, trembling on my statue, A fickle play of gold, which covers the marble. But I know what I see with my departed glance; My dark eye is the doorway to infernal dwellings! I think, abandoning to the breeze the hours And the soul which comes not back from the bitter shrubs, I think, at the golden brink of the universe, Of that longing for death which possessed the Syble And which feeds on the hope that the last days are near. I renew in myself my enigmas, my gods, My steps interrupted by heavenly discourse, My pauses, on a foot with its burden of dreams, Which follow and mirror a bird's varying flight, Once again wagering on the sun against nothing, And burning, grave goal of my astonished marble.

O DANGEROUSLY to be a prey of one's own gaze!

For the eye of the mind upon its silken beaches Has already seen too many days glimmer and fade Whose progress and colours I was able to predict. The ennui, the bright ennui which mirrored their shading, Gave me a deadly head start upon my own life: The dawn unveiled to me all of the adverse day. I was neither living nor dead; and perhaps, half Immortal, dreaming that even the future itself Was nothing but a diamond set in that diadem Where is exchanged the chill of misfortunes not yet born With many other absolutes fiery at my brow.

Will it then dare, Old Time, from my divers buried days, Resuscitate an evening favoured by the doves, An evening in whose wake a tattered shred unwinds To my obedient childhood's reflected blushes, And bathe in its emerald a lasting rose of shame?

MEMORY, o log-pyre, whose golden breeze affronts, Blow my mask scarlet impregnating the refusal To be in myself in flame other than what I was… Come, my blood, come redden the pallid circumstance That made noble the azure of the holy distance, And the scarce moving iris of the time I adored! Come squander upon me this gift bleached of colour; Come! that I may recognise and that I may detest, This child who takes umbrage, this silent complicity, This evidential trouble who bathes in the wood… And from my frozen breast let fresh rebound the voice That I did not know so raucous or so veiled with love… The charming neck still searching for the winged huntress.

My heart was it so close to a heart about to fail?

Was it then me, fringed lashes, who thought to bury myself In a backward looking sweetness smiling at your threats… O tendrils on my cheek errant with stubborn threads, Or you... of lashes woven and of fluid shafts, Tender glow of an evening broken by doubtful arms?

MY EYES TRACE OUT MYTEMPLE, SET IT IN THE HEAVENS! THAT ON ME MAY REPOSE AN UNPARALLELED ALTAR!

My whole body cried out the pallor and the stone… The earth is to me no more than a coloured headband Which sliding down declines a vertiginous white brow...

The whole universe falters and trembles on my stalk, The woven crown of thought escapes my spirit quite, And Death wants to inhale this rose beyond all price Whose sweetness is important to his shadowy ends!

What if my soft fragrance goes to your hollow head, O Death, inhale then at last this slave of a king: Call me by name, release me!... And lose all hope of me, So weary of myself, an image self-condemned! Listen... Wait no longer... The revivifying year Predicates through all my blood its secret movements: The frost gives up reluctantly its final diamonds… Tomorrow, with a sigh of glittering Goodness, The spring will come to shatter the frozen fountains: The astounding spring laughs, violates... We know not where It comes from? But its naive words murmur so sweetly That a tenderness takes the earth to its very bowels… The trees fill out again and replenish their bark Laden with many limbs and too many horizons, Moving towards the sun their thunderous fleeces, Stretching up into the bitter air all of their wings With leaves in their thousands which they flourish as new… Do you not hear tremble these ethereal names, O Deaf One!... And in this space oppressed by its bonds, Vibrant with living wood bent upwards by its summit, For and against the gods plies the unanimous tree, The floating forest out of whose encrusted trunks They reverently bear their incredible heads, Heartbroken departures to superb scattered islands, A tender stream, o Death, and hidden under the grass?

WHO can resist, among mortals, these upheavals? Who among mortals can?

With me so pure, my knees Sensing the terror of the knees' defencelessness...

The air exhausts me. The bird pierces with childhood's cries Past hearing... the same shadow itself which grips my heart, And, roses! my sigh that lifts you up, conqueror Alas! of gentle arms that shut you in the basket… Oh! amongst my hairs one weighs with the weight of a bee, Plunging always more drunk and with a kiss more sharp, The delicious point of my ambiguous day… The Light!... Or you, o Death! But the promptest may take me!... My heart beats! my heart beats! My breast burns and leads me! Ah! that it may expand, swelling and straining, this hard Yet most mild witness captive in my network of blue… Hard in me... but so soft in the infinite mouth!...

Dear nascent phantoms whose cravings unite in me, Desires! Glowing faces!... And you, fine fruits of love, Have the gods fashioned in me these maternal contours And these sinuous sides, these folds and these waiting cups, So that life might embrace an altar of delights, Where the alien soul blends in eternal returns, The semen, the milk, and the blood forever flow? No! Horrible insight, atrocious harmony! Every kiss the presage of a fresh agony… I see, I see adrift, fleeing the honour of flesh The impotent spirits in their bitter millions… No, breath! No, glances, tenderness... my companions, Thirsty people imploring me to let you live, No, you should not depend upon me for life!... Go, Spectres, sighs which the night unavailingly exhales, Go join the dead in their impalpable numbers! I will not bestow the light upon these shadows, I keep watch far from you, a spirit grim and clear… No! You should not depend on the lightning of my lips!... And then... my heart also refuses you its thunder. I have pity on us all, o swirling winds of dust!

Great Gods! I wander lost in your baffling ways!

I will implore no more your weak illumination, Envious for so long to melt upon my face, O most imminent tear, which is my sole response, A tear that trembles as my human glance surveys The many divers paths which lead us to the grave; You proceed from the soul, that labyrinth of pride. You carry from my heart this drop under duress, This mere abstraction of my most precious substance That comes to sacrifice my shades before my eyes, Tender libation to a motive still in doubt! From a grotto of fear at my hollowed out depth The mysterious salt mutely pervades the water. From where are you born? What labour always sad and new Draws you tardily out, tear, from the bitter shadow? You mounted by my stages as mortal and mother, And heartbreaking your route, an unrelenting burden, In the time of my life, the slow pace that you take Suffocates me... I keep silent, drink your certain course… - Who called upon you for help to assuage my young wound?

But wounding injuries, sobs, sombre attempts, why? For whom then, cruel jewels, do you mark this cold body, Blind with groping fingers hoping to evade hope! Where does it go, unanswered by its own ignorance, This body in the dark night astonished by its faith? Restless earth... and with the seaweed mingled, carry me, Carry me softly... Has my weakness like unto snow Strength enough to proceed until it finds its snare? Where linger you, my swan, where seek you out your flight? ... Most precious hardness... O awareness of the soil, My step founded upon you a sacred confidence! But beneath the living foot that explores and creates And touches with horror its agreement made at birth, This so firm seeming earth my pedestal achieves. Not far off, among these steps, my precipice dreams… The insensate rock, seaweed slippery, propitious To flight, (since in itself ineffably alone), Commences... And the wind seems to blow through a shroud Weaving with its rumours of the sea a confused web, Mingling with the breaking of the waves, and the oars…

So many long drawn out gulps, and clashing death-rattles, Shattered, returned by the sea... and the lots all cast Wild divers ways rolled to voracious oblivion...

Alas! will he who finds the tracks of my naked feet Stop long enough to consider someone not himself?

Restless earth, and with the seaweed mingled, carry me!

MYSTERIOUS ME, even so, you live once more! You go to recognise yourself at the break of dawn Bitterly the same...

A reflection from the sea Emerges... And on its lips, a smile of yesterday Wearily heralding the effacement of all signs, Chill in the eastern sky already the pale lines Of light and of stone, and the abundant prison Round which will float the ring of the horizon only… Look: an arm of the purist is seen, self-denuded. I see you again, my arm... You bear the dawn...

O rude

Awakening of a victim reprieved... and threshold So mild... so clear, how flattering, the reef's appearance, The low waters, and the wash of the muffled sea-swell!... The darkness which deserts me, an undying victim, Discloses me reddened thus with new desires, On the terrible altar of all my memories.

There, the sea-foam strives to make itself visible; And there, unsteady on a craft that will respond To each buffeting wave, an eternal fisherman. All then conspires to accomplish its solemn act Of always returning incomparable and chaste, And of restoring the tomb possessed of a god To its gracious state of universal laughter.

HAIL! Divinities made by the rose and the salt, And the first playthings of the growing early light, Islands!... Hives before long, when the primary flame Will serve to make your rock, o islands that I predict,

Feel in its reddening the powers of paradise; Peaks that a fruitful fire scarcely intimidates, Woods that will be humming with beasts and with ideas, With hymns of men fulfilled by the gifts of a just sky, Islands! in the murmur of your sea-bright girdle, Mothers ever virgin, yet bearing these same marks, You are to me as I kneel so marvellously Fates: Nothing can match above ground the flowers you put forth, But, in the hidden depth, your feet are cold as ice!

THE soul prepares itself under the eased temple, My death, a child secret and already established, And you, divine disgusts that have given me flight, Chaste deviations from the lustre of my fate, Have you no more, fervour, than a noble duration? No one has with the gods ever ventured closer Nor dared paint on her forehead their ravishing breath, And from the depths of the perfect night imploring, To claim on its very lip a murmur supreme...

I resisted the splendour of a death so pure As I once long ago had resisted the sun… My body in despair twisting the naked torso Where the soul, drunk on self, on silence and on glory, Ready to be subsumed by its own memory, Listens, full of hope, beating upon the pious wall Of this heart, - which it wrecks with mysterious blows, Until it can no more hold than by its indulgence A delicate trembling of a leaf, my presence...

Waiting in vain, and vainly... She may then not die Who before her mirror weeps in order to feel.

O SHOULD I NOT then, idiot, have accomplished My marvellous end of selecting for torture This lucid disdain for the nuances of fate?

Will you nevermore find so transparent a death Nor a more pure slope where I climb to my ruin Than in this long regard of a victim laid half-open, Pale, who has resigned herself and bleeds without regret?

What's all this blood to her when no longer her secret? In what a whitening peace this crimson rush leaves her, At the limits of being, and lovely in her weakness! She calms thus the time that comes but to abolish, The moment supreme may not make her more pallid, So much the empty flesh kisses a sombre spring!... She herself always made more alone and more remote… And me, of a like destiny, the heart always closer, My cortège, in spirit, rocked by cypresses asleep...

Towards an aromatic wisp of future smoke, I feel myself conducted, offered up and consumed, All, all a long-destined promise to the happy clouds! What's more, I appear to myself that vaporous tree, Of which its majesty so lightly thrown away Is wholly abandoned to the love of expansion. Being's immenseness wins me, and from my divine heart The incense that burns breaths out a form without end… All the body radiant trembles in my essence!...

No, no!... Kindle no more this vague recollection! Sombre lily! Obscure hint of the heavens, Your strength could not shatter so precious a vessel… Among all the instants you touched on the supreme… - But who then could prevail over the same power, So eager with your eyes to contemplate the day That has chosen your brow for its luminous tower?

Seek out, the least, to tell you, by what silent process The night, amid the dead, has guided you back to day? Recall yourself to yourself, take up instinctively This thread (your gilded touch disputes it with the morn), This thread whose tenuity so blindly followed Even unto this coastline restored to you your life… Be discerning... cruel... or more subtle still!... Lie But learn!... Instruct me by whatever enchantments, Coward who knows not how to flee her tepid breathing Nor her concern for a breast of sweet-smelling clay, By what return to yourself, reptile, did you renew Your cavernous perfumes and your gloomy spirits?

YESTERDAY the deep flesh, yesterday, the ruling flesh Betrayed me... Oh! with no dream, and without a caress!... No demon, no perfume offered to me the peril Of imagined arms dying upon a manly neck; Nor, from out of the Swan-God, have plumes offended by His own brilliant whiteness brushed lightly across my thought...

He would have known all the same the most tender of nests!

For with all the favour of my limbs united, Virgin, I was in that shade a choicest offering… But the sleep of the spirit is a sweetness so great, And knotted to myself by the slack of my hair, I have languidly lost my autonomous kingdom. In the midst of my arms, I became another… Who is alienated?... Who flies?... Who wallows?... On what obscure detour, was my heart melted? What conch is repeating the name that I have lost? Do I know, what treacherous ebb tide stranded me In my extremity so pure and premature, And in me revived the meaning of my immense sigh? Like the bird that alights, I must be lulled to rest.

It was the hour, perhaps, when the prophetess Dwelling within is fatigued and loses interest: She is no longer the same... A profound infant On the untrodden ways vain in her own defence, Asking again from afar for hands she abandoned. One must concede to the wishes of the holy dead And take for her face a breath of air... But softly, I am here: my forehead is close to its consent...

This body, I pardon it, and I taste the ashes. I give myself wholly up to the happy descent, Open to the dark witnesses, the tormented arms, Among the words without end, without me, stammered out… Sleep, my wisdom, sleep. Form for yourself this absence; Return to the seed and the sombre innocence. Resign your life for that of the serpents, the treasures… Sleep always! Descend, sleep always! Descend, sleep, sleep!

(The lowly doorway is a ring... and where the gauze Is passed through... All dies, all laughs in the twittering throat… The bird drinks from your mouth and you may not see him… Come lower still, speak low... The dark is not so dark...)

DELICIOUS WINDING-SHEETS, my lukewarm disorder, Bed where I loose myself, question myself and concede, Where I was wont to take my heart to quench its beatings, Almost a living tomb within my own apartments, Who breaths, and to whom even eternity listens, Place full of myself which has assumed me wholly, O form of my form and out of the hollow heat Which my return to myself acknowledges theirs, Here is where so much of pride immersed in your folds Is blent at the last with the pettiness of the dream! In your sheets, where smoothly she mimics her own death The reluctant idol disposes herself and sleeps, Weary absolute woman, and the eyes in their tears, When, of her naked secrets the caves and the charms, And the rest of the love with which she guards her body Have corrupted her ruin and her accords with death.

Ark completely secret, and nevertheless so near, My transports, this night, were thinking to break your chains; I have done no more than cradle with lamentations Your flanks so weighted down with day and creations! What! my eyes coldly misled by so much blueness Can watch the perishing of a star fine and rare, And the young sun of my earliest astonishments Seems like a grandmother shining down on agonies, So much does the flame of remorse ravish existence, And composes out of the dawn a precious substance That would already form the substance of a tomb!... O, on all the sea, on my feet, it is beautiful! You draw near!... I am always the one that you breathe, My dissolving veil drifts me towards your empires ... Well, have I done no more, vain farewells if I live, Than form dreams?... If I come, in ravishing garments, Unto this brink, without horror, to breath the high foam, Drink in through my eyes the vast and smiling bitterness,

A being against the wind, in the sharpest of air, Receiving full in the face a call from the sea; If the intense soul breathes, and there furiously swells Sheer wave out of exhausted wave, and if the wave Booms, to immolate a monster of naivety, And comes from the high seas to vomit its profoundness On this rock, from where spurts even to my very thoughts A dazzling array of frozen glittering sparks, And over all my skin bites a harsh awakening, Well, in spite of myself, it needs must be, o Sun, That I adore my heart where you come yourself to know, Fresh and powerful return of the delight of birth,

Fire towards whom one elevates a virgin of blood Under the golden species of a breast's thanksgiving!