Rene Char

Vermillion

                                    to a painter who questioned me 



Whether she comes, as mistress, to your beckoning stair,
Or whether she calls out of the wood haze;
Whether she be alert and followed in her chamber,
Wedded to her window, the fusil unnoticed;
Her hand, cleaving the sea and caressing your fingers,
Displaces the invariable bourn of summer.

I can hear night and the tempest making the beach-shingle
Of Agrigento sing in the iron of your walls.

Maker, what frustration to be unable to draw from her beggar's cave
The source, that is our own. 



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