i can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

write, for instance: “the night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”

the night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

i can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
i loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

on nights like this, I held her in my arms.
i kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

she loved me, sometimes I loved her.
how could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

i can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
to think I don’t have her. To feel that I’ve lost her.

to hear the immense night, more immense without her.
and the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

what does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her.
he night is full of stars and she is not with me.

that’s all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
my soul is lost without her.

as if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
my heart searches for her and she is not with me.

the same night that whitens the same trees.
we, we who were, we are the same no longer.

i no longer love her, true, but how much i loved her.
my voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

someone else’s. she will be someone else’s. as she once
belonged to my kisses.
her voice, her light body. her infinite eyes.

i no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
love is so short and oblivion so long.

because on nights like this i held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem i write for her.

mai jos un fragment

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
‘Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
‘You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!’