Muse

Nets cast into water glaze as
in dark lindens' vatic hush
pensively a maiden gazes
at the scales of magic fish.

Now in animalish rapture
scarlet tails they curl and swish,
Now, aquamarine, the capture
light, transparency their wish.

Ecstatic, she has misconstrued
the deep imprinted waters' fruit,
the head of Orpheus, supposed
to surface as a golden rose.

February, 1922.

"In the slanting gleam of mirrors... "

With toils cast out in mirrors' slanting glimmer,
I bent toward the sunset's greenish pool.
I trace the patterns of the barely rippling
Somnambulist of lakes becoming gold!
Like blood that seeps from under cotton wool
Upon a granite slab appears a stripling,
And by the languid dark in honeyed summer,
Gray-visaged, he's prophetically encowled.
"Live, Unmoving one!" -- eyelids will shiver,
I'll fall to touch his tender palms with greed,
Let my divine companion come to cool
The languor of an all but quenchless need.
I do not recollect, do not foresee, --
The flight of moments, light and loving, free,
You bring a halt to suddenly, forever,
By splendour of your cheeks becoming young.

April, 1922.

"Pure art is engendered and perfected in its own special closed circle, detached from the whole world, with its own particular demands, as the world of a sick madman (even if ideal and well-constructed, but in its detachment and abstraction mad)."--Mikhail Kuzmin

*two poems more*

While in search of the poem Crepuscule Du Soir Mystique (Mystical Evening Twilight) by Paul Verlaine in English I translated the poem by myself. Here is the new word for word translation:

Memory and Evening Twilight
redden and tremble at the glowing skyline
of expectations in flames that retire
and thus enlarge, of which partition
mysterious or repeated bloom
--dahlia, lily, tulip, banewort--
climb around the trellis, and circle
amidst the morbific exhalations
of warm and disturbing perfumes, which is poison
--dahlia, lily, tulip, banewort--
flooding my senses, my soul and my reason,
they mix, into immense languor,
Memory and Evening Twilight.

And this is my version of La Lune Blanche by Paul Verlaine:

The white moon
shines in the woods;
from each bough
comes a voice
under the branch…

Oh, beloved.

The pond reflects,
deep mirror,
the silhouette
of the black willow
where the wind cries…

Let us dream, now is the hour.

A vast and tender
appeasing
seems to descend
from the firmament
as an iridescent orb...

It is the exquisite hour.

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