Rimbaud the Son by Pierre Michon—
Translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays
Yale University Press, 2013
If you’re going to single out the agony of “the gift”, the iron in irony, the embodiment of the tormented artist, the lost son of all sons, it would be Rimbaud.
It would be human and masculine.
It would be what is recovered
L’éternité.
It would be what is pure
La mer mêlée au soleil.
“History is all about fathers, sons and whores.”
-Duncan McNaughton
Or the dark well of a single mother who can’t, just can’t- because the farm in Charleville is a daydream surfacing only in the sallow yellow sunbeam that comes out from the attic window like a church bell on Sunday when everything is hideous and you’re supposed to remember.
Remember what?
Infamy and alchemy, perhaps.
Yet the ‘Carabosse’ (mommy) can’t breathe, so fades into the shadow of her dark fingers, like Eurydice, gripping the edge of the bowl of the dark well, lined with wild forget-me-nots.
Whether rebellion is a curse or a blessing, it’s still poetry.
So he walked. Back and forth from the future into the past and back again from 1854 to 1891.
Crossed the Alps on foot. In Italy (if I remember correctly)- walking, walking, walking until his ribs cut into his Siddhartha stomach lining.
Burst!
He wanted to burst from the very first time he watched a spider.
He became a saint behind the closed shutters in Camden Town, perching like a peacock in the presence of a devil.
Drown in the green fairy and rise out of the lake like a Lancelot with a sword wound by violets whose roots are stronger than your thin wrist.
So after the offenses and defenses, after the crime of the enfant terrible, and all along the solitude, the one thing that loved you- solitude, you plunged, like Eurydice, back into the dark, fecund pantomime of the earth below the earth
And in Abyssinia, illegally exported guns.
Maybe once upon a dream you remembered your boyhood with three sisters, an older brother, the haystacks, the color of each letter of the alphabet and the lapis-lazuli chunks of sky blinding the pillows of clouds where you chose to hide
Your wings.
Until the day you took the train
Without a ticket
To the Gods.
Michon thinks you were nervous before the steps to Zeus’s Palace.
I do not.
Zeus doesn’t give a crap about peonies and the prodigal son has eyes like Novalis’ blue flower
and a body protected by thorns.
You were sixteen.
You wanted the hue of that vast, endless sky
Seen from the well of the soul
It’s not a good view.
But it’s focused in a circle that is beyond you.
Was it at nineteen, or in Cypress, or in Africa, when you finally understood how freedom spoiled you? Surrender, surrender to the sands of the line, to the banks of Lethe. And plaster your fasting with a belt made of gold.
She was as black as the country wife’s fingers.
She emerged from the dead cavern of Verlaine and the blood of the lonesome soldier in the meadow and the invisible city of the barracks across oceans.
Once it stopped
There was beauty.
That spider crawling in the attic, in the sallow yellow sunbeam, is a messenger from Izambard, the ferryman, telling you to give him a penny
but instead you knocked on the door and had your photograph taken.
Who gives a fuck about the crooked bow tie? It was brown, the color of shit. Not your own shit, or Paul’s, or Banville’s, or Hugo’s, or your mother’s or father’s or sisters’ or brother’s, or even Monsieur Carjat in the black hood over the plate of silver nitrate… The bow tie in the black and white photograph is the color of Jesus’s shit.
Carjat wanted to touch it (the crooked bow tie), to adjust it-
But dude, if you were in front of Jesus’s shit would you adjust it?
(Touch it, maybe, but adjust it?)
You were hung over. Then you were drunk and then you were hung over. Fuck Virgil, fuck Dante, fuck Shakespeare, fuck Hugo, fuck Mallarme, fuck Baudelaire…
No, not Baudelaire, he’s my baby.
History is reversed. I’m the first.
A charcoal sky over Paris, day after day. They all want me. They are hungry. I am not. So I stay. Their soup is spiced with my piss, their lips are parched by my invisible sun. They laugh, imagining how my white ass must be luminous as the moon.
I wanted grace. I didn’t know it then, but I wanted it.
Books were gentle. The pages were silky. The bindings were hard. They smelled like History. They smelled like the well.
I saw the sea, remembered love and learned how to bring it against me.
Wave after wave after wave…
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