Motion
(Translations of Rimbaud)
The motion of the masthead rig on the bank beside the falls
of the river,
The womb-pit at the sternpost,
The celerity of the incline,
The great thrust of the current
Led through the lights unheard
And the New Chemistry
The travellers encircled from the cyclone of the valley
And of the river’s-song.
These are the conquerors of the world
Seeking her personality of chemical fortune;
The sport and the comfort embark with them;
They take the education
Of the races, the classes and the beasts, on this vessel
Repose and vertigo
To the light diluvial
To the terrible evenings of study.
For of the chatter amid the apparatus, the blood, the
flowers, the fire, the ornaments
Of the account of agitations at that fleeing border
—One sees, turbined like a breakwater beyond
the hydraulic railways,
Monstrous, lit from within without end, —their stock
of studies;
Those driven in harmonic ecstasy
And the heroism of discovery.
To the atmospheric accidents, those most unusual,
A couple in youth insulate themselves on the arch,
—Is it that naïve savagery we pardon—
And sing and take the post.
H
(Translations of Rimbaud)
All of them violently disfigured the gestures of war-crimes of The Gardener, of Hortense. The
machine of arousal is her solitude; her listlessness the conversation of love. Under the surveillance
of a childhood, she has summer, numbered by the ages, the burning hygiene of the races. Her door
is open to the misery. The morality of things-in-being comes apart in her passion, or by her action.
- O the terrible excitement of beginners' love under-the-blood-red sun and in the hydrogen lamp-
lights! For The Gardener. For Hortense.
