Summer Sadness

(from Mallarmé)

 

The sun runs a lazy tub in your hair's goldness,
Fighter, asleep on the sand,
And, burning incense on your traitor jowl,
Folds-in your tears to a love-potion.

The changeless lull of this white blaze
Has made my timid kisses say in sadness:
         "Never shall we rest, a lonely mummy
         Under the antique desert and the happy palms !"

But your hair's a lukewarm river:
A place for drowning, coldly, the soul that haunts us
And for finding this 'Nothingness' you do not know !

I'll lick the shadow from your lidded eyes
To see if it will lend the heart you batter
The insensibility of the stones and sky.

---

From 'Birth Windows', Barque 1999.
First published in Shearsman magazine, second series, no.29, 1996.

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