My child mistress/mother sister/dream
How acceptable all things would be
Were we to live in that land where
The slow and the long, short and the strong
Die in the dance of being less than one another
In a perpetual summer of imageless desire.
Flagellated and forgotten suns
Drink in the step of my azure lost skies
And move to mysterylessness our chemical miseries
Within which the treadling eyes of indefiniteness
Are no more than the tears of the damned.
Take from my heart, a platinum measure
Free of solitude's false grace
And awkward adolescent pleasures.
Here is the furniture
That caresses the dust of the years
And counts the wrinkled set into the brain
On fingers that have made their own doom.
Evil the eyes that look back at us in dreams,
Evil the touch of the deaths that have not loved us
Evil the sorrow which shelters itself from release
And the evils accumulate
Leaving us idle and alone
Though an Eastern splendor,
An Eastern hatred of the idea of loss
Eddies in the river of slime
That has not won us.
Hidden from the waves in still canals
We sit in a small boat that refuses
To set forth.
To satisfy need,
To accommodate our need of forever,
We sit in the boat
And wait for a clearer sky,
A more propitious moment to launch
While thinking of Cortez'
Miraculous slaughter of and victory over
The children of the sun.


'L'invitation au voyage'-Charles Baudelaire — translation Will Schmitz