Kaleidoscope (excerpt)
In a street, in the heart of the city of dreams,
it will be as if one had lived there in past years:
an instant at once very vague, very clear...
Oh, this sun shining through a fog rising in steam!
Oh, this voice in the woods, this cry on the sea!
It will be as if one had forgotten the causes:
he slowly wakes up from these metempsychoses,
and things will be then as they all used to be
in this street, in the heart of the magical town
when the organ grinds jigs for the ends of the days,
where the inns will have cats sleeping on the buffets,
and bands of musicians stroll up and down.
It will be so inevitable, one almost feels
he'll die for it, while down his cheeks roll the tears,
and the laughter sobbed out in the fracas of the wheels,
invocations to death that will come with the years...
from:
Selected Poems
Paul Verlaine; translated by CF MacIntyre
U. Cal., 1970
841 V521s