As I descended the impassable rivers,
I no longer felt the hands of my guides:
Howling redskins had taken them as targets
And nailed their naked bodies to painted poles.
I was indifferent to all crews,
Those porters of Flemish wheat and English cotton.
With the chatter of human company left behind,
The water let me float and fall in my own way.
In the furious tumult of the winter rapids,
Running random as children's thoughts, I raced.
Unmoored peninsulas have not undergone
A metamorphosis more triumphant.
The tempest blessed my maritime awakening.
Like a cork I bobbed and danced on waves,
The so-called neverending tides of the dead.
For ten nights, I gazed at the looming eye of the lighthouse!
More succulent than sour apples to a child,
Green water penetrated the seams of my hull,
Washing the stains of vomit and blue wine away,
Swallowing my rudder and grappling-hook.
After that, I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars and milk,
Devouring the azure greens; where a pale floater,
The stricken face of a corpse drifts by;
Where, suddenly dyeing the blue, delirious
Rhythms flare and blaze under the sun,
More potent than alcohol, vaster than our guitars,
Ferment the bittersweet reds of love!
I know the heavens opened by lightning, waterspouts,
Whirlpools and surf; I know the night,
And dawn rising, exalted as a column of doves,
And I saw what other men only thought they saw!
I’ve seen the low sun touched with mystic horrors,
Illuminated with long violet arms,
Like actors in a ancient drama,
The distant waves rolling in the shivering dark!
I’ve dreamed of green night and dazzling snows,
Kisses gently mounting the eyelids of the sea,
The circulation of marrow in bone,
The chant of phosphorous yellow and blue awakenings!
I followed for endless months the rushing waves,
Like a stampede of cattle, assaulting the reefs,
I cannot imagine that even the luminous feet of the Mary
Could muffle the snout of those panting Oceans!
I struck against, you know, fantastic Floridas
Mingling with flowers the eyes of panthers and the skin
Of men! Rainbows stretched like bridle reins
To glaucous herds beneath the horizon of the sea!
I’ve seen the fermentation of enormous marshes,
Where a Leviathan rots in its net!
Avalanches of water in bays of tranquility,
Distance horizons cataracting toward the abyss!
Glaciers and silver suns, cancerous waves, burning skies!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of infested gulfs
Where giant serpents devoured by bedbugs
Fall from twisted trees amidst black perfumes!
I would have liked to show children those golden fish
Of the blue wave, those singing fish.
—Flowers of foam blessed my wanderings
And ineffable winds gave me wings.
At times, the martyred sea tired of poles and zones,
Cradled me gently on her heaving breasts,
And lifted up to me her flowering shadows and yellowed cups
And I rested there, like a woman on her knees...
Like an island, I sailed, tossing overboard
The quarrels and droppings of pale eyed birds.
I voyaged on, when through my frail lines and ropes
Drowned men descended backward into sleep!
Now I, a lost boat in a cove of trailing tresses,
Jettisoned by the storm into a birdless space,
Whose water-drunken carcass would not have been saved
By the Monitors or Galleons of the Hanseatic League;
Free, smoking, billowing in violet fog,
I pierced the blushing wall of the sky,
And ripened by the sun and the spit of the blue sea
Made the jam that all good poets love;
And ran, spotted with electric and crescent moons,
A mad plank, escorted by black seahorses,
When July hammers the ultramarine skies
With spiraling and flaming blows;
I, who trembled, hearing the moaning of the Behemoths
In heat and the echo of Maelstroms fifty leagues off,
Eternal tail of the blue immobility.
I long for Europe with its ancient
parapets!
I’ve seen archipelagos and islands in the delirious skies
Open to wanderers and voyageurs alike:
—Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep, exiled,
With a million golden birds, with a force to come? –
True, I have wept too much! Dawns are heartbreaking.
All moons are atrocious and all suns bitter.
Poisoned love has filled me with weariness.
Let my hull burst! Let me go to sea!
If I desire any European waters, it is the cold
And black pond where in the perfumed twilight
A squatting child full of sadness sets sail
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.
I can no longer, bathed in your fatigue and waves,
Obliterate the wake of cotton boats,
Nor cross through the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim under the hateful eyes of prison ships.
