Poems from Point de mire (Focal Point), pub. 1921, by Céline Arnauld.
Translated from the French by Henry Cole Smith.
A Dream in Black Garment
Pale — cascading delicately down cheekbones
a dream in black garment
Snaking backwards in a hurricane bullseye
She lost her beautiful smile
She lost her beautiful gaze
For catching sunbeams
ensnared in a net of vapors
With an agony key — cemetery hum
Who extinguished this drunken flame
Born in a puddle of water
Raging — and unsure what to do with her hands
From a crucifix in the valley's porticoes we hanged her
With spider’s silk
She found her smile, she found her gaze
In a smoke ring
To snuff out a candle or snuff out a life
To extinguish a shower of sunbeams
It’s no different than kissing the sunset goodbye
Crawling in the tracks of the moon
And blowing out glowworms from on high…
Shut off the spotlights
Of sounds, laughter, and nightmares
Reborn yawning with serpents
Her life — her smile, her gaze
Such unprecedented things
The flame of a candle
Mid-Lent
So slacken your arms, life, usher of love
Caged acrobat
The squirrel spins like a Ferris wheel
Likewise the mockingbird
Learning through the prism of the human arena
Black-headed gulls — seagulls with little floured faces
Racket-tailed hummingbirds
Stop laugh jump
This is emancipation or war
Because it’s death that awaits you
When the party paused to catch its breath
The seagulls delivered their message
It was a banishment — his
Then an arrow pierced heart and laughter
And they remained silent
He in his thoughts and her at the water's edge…
Did they speak — confess
The chariot brought confetti
And she extended her arms
To the pitch of the boomerang
Party
Bal-musette like a stampede
Illuminated by the firing squad
Femme fatale free-for-all
Strangled etymologies strung round the neck
Like hide-and-seek lanterns
Surrounding this target riddled with holes…
Angling for stars
All this for you
Big tears of a novitiate’s bliss flow
Down every cheek along the streets
It’s a cry of petty indignation
And the marching-on of human parades
Why must we love you so…
But with the grace of a steeple, the barrier
Divorces the party from the world
The morning glory–swords awaken — tears well up
I’ve come a long way — we’ve got a climb ahead
Aspiration raps on the windows
Objects are displaced — the moon descends in tremolo
The street cleaner sweeps up superfluous words
Cries of joy lift my heart
Let’s drink to hatred and insult
Carriage 31 is mine…
Angling for stars
Persecution
We no longer know if we should buck up or stand by
This sunbeam laden with wax and foliage rears up
Blinded with sobbing childishness
It would be prudent to surrender peacefully
Isolated in a grimoire, words materialize
We don't know for whom — we don't know why
We seize them all for ourselves
Whirlwind squalls assault the slats
Sorcery — stinging nettle, and what else?
To delight in a battery of the mind…
I am not your enemy
The flight of a sigh is a flash of laughter
The laugher triumphs, the trajectory plummets
To bestow a poem is a hand unfurling
And reaching toward dazzling generosities
I didn’t ask you for anything — what do you want from me…
Brightness kindled — firebrand with boiler eyes
Flickering eyelids in silkworm wax
Watch the pout slumber
The sullen is worse than the mirthful
Who withers under the ridicule of unholy harassment
Please admit that I didn't steal anything from you
Of your runaway affection
I am not your enemy
In the Abyss
All the past was sponged up by the abyss
Locked in a quatrain like a coffin
This democratic lifeblood
sidestepping the severity of so many crimes
Bursts into a fabulous circus of caverns and legends
Abstruse like mimes
It takes thirty days o earthlings
To circumnavigate the old windmill
One more is insanity
it’s the buzzing that commences
Coil of a feral grimace
Between four planks isolated in space
Gathering then the honey — comedies buzzing…
Your four cursed verses
Siloed grains of love
Along the wall — along the wall…
Jeer the insulting parade — garner promotion
The advancement of love — at the foot of the wall
The winning horse — a thoroughbred
Extra-dry from the amazons
To death the inopportune — what a bizarre comedy
To purify the world of this swan sunbeam
For this quatrain quaffed to the dregs
These four cursed verses
Romance in B Flat
Coal miner, your teeth in B flat that mimic
The luminous range of your laughter
Think of those singers lodged in the funnel
Caught up in the flood of birdsong
and sunbeams
And carried on a smile to your ivory mine
Are these the songs that lurk undiscovered by agents
Around the dry and haggard pond…
Commodore, the memorabilia of night
at the ends of poems
Compete with evenings to win the expanse
Then come the optics of tales lost in affection
Reinvented in their naked immensity…
And if the water goes then sadness returns
Space is purified and birds are dancing
And sounding the funnels, nucleus of the forest
At the bottoms of reservoirs
Romance in B flat
The haggard keyboard has lost its silence
The fish, the dance of the musical pond
Coal miner, have you met the scholar singer
Who spans the range of my songs
Mocking — and despising your ivory teeth — your teeth
He’s enclosed himself in a wasp's nest…
Mariner, don’t let my singer die
My poet-singer who plays on a swing
Apotheosis
While the dazzling cannonade of imprisoned wind
Dies in the well…
My youth on the hill
Wheat and ryegrass quarreling
Gently
Take pity on my light
For I have not yet loved the rosebush
The ryegrass sang
Keep laughing spiritual thief
Ostensibly ensconced in the memory of the poet
Aren’t you afraid of being hanged
By the neck of reality
A deep sorrow
Wave of hallucinations
Born of my cruelty
Surrounds my brow
This loneliness is blonde
Divine mortification at the summit of a pyramid
Of silence and fake jewelry
The villages sink into green abysses
Tense with too much white
And thus the procession
The lyrical motorcade glimpsed only by me
Bow — laugh — dance
Behold the king of the muses the carny the revenant
And in his wake the sun dragged by birds
All in celluloid
The Virgin in Ripolin
Crystal butterflies
A muse in tatters
A cardboard love
Don Quixote in satin…
Headed for the parade
It’s his apotheosis
All of you beware
He’s the crowning meteor in the wheel…
I would like to never die
Let me love him too
Lift me up to see him
Pleads the wastrel
Just Don’t Look
Just don’t look with indifference
The dead will betray you
They are the loyal, the opium dreamers
The transparency of our psyche
Who can’t bear the grave
Nor suicide of the heart…
But the outstretched arms
Immense possession of this loving selfhood
Of inner vigor and incomprehension…
Your pride circumscribed in a few smoke rings…
Then the leap of calculation — of the sciences
Old — old — the ancient winks of umbral roses
Drifting passions like lavender breath
These dead with eyes glued to the clerestories…
Why don’t we leap over these graves
This tangle of ivy and casks
Forsaken in the wind…
We’ve gotten sidetracked here
While prattling about time — Wait, aha
I’ve found my cross
