The Albatross


Solve this: for amusement my favorite detective carries home
a pregnant albatross under his sea-blue vest.
Who should follow but that lazy bunch from his sea voyage.
They come gliding along on ice skates, then one trips and bloodies
his gums on the concrete.

The pain some have even though they're not sick bends me to
the surfer's point of view
that rows of chess players on the boardwalk malign the sea, haunt it
lazily. 'Tis a damn pity, the grand leers they make at the white squares
as though they made up the front of an ice truck. Training on the coast

this traveler lost his gloves, his title, and for what?!
Lay on your back in a row boat, get laid, read a comic.
An ape's belly could break your heart with its brutish, gauloise
laughter. A botanist is the same. He foliates on his infirmities.

What does a poet look like? is he the prince of nudes?
These questions haunted me when the musicians were rioting for
Joan of Arc.
In the end, at least the sour sun tastes the best of my hues
and sails them out giant-sized, as fish in a marching band.



Falsely translated from Charles Baudelaire's
"L'Albatros," Les Fleurs Du Mal

* * *

Fer Yelluh


At the end of eternity is the garden of our hound dog!
He's there now, rolling his eyes dumbly in the terrible jungle
Knowing from where he's sitting that living on a golf course
again would be hell.

There is little urine on the flowers he looks over now.
Our hero has sniffed the strange scent of uniform makers, and
rolled around in shit
In the ravine haunted by the ghosts of mailmen's cats.

O the fur on this cur covers an ulcerated heart
Worn down by vengeance shouldered against traitor dogs who
pissed on his plot.
My dear doggy! Your broken teeth, your gnawed-on ears,
Your paws are callused! Youth will not come to you again

It has dried up while you ripped apart the carcass of some dead animal.
These yellow stains and this snatch of hair caught on the screen door
are what's left
To elaborate on your smell and your howl
And how I carried you out to the garden, heavy, with both my arms.



Falsely translated from Charles Baudelaire's
"Duellum," Les Fleurs Du Mal

* * *

The Swan


i

Laundromat, I think of you. This little sleeve
Poor and twisted, in the mirror I see spots of green
The immense majesty of your dryers cannot fluff away.
A Chinese woman is thinking for me of who has a big enough faucet

To get the stains of shit out of my fertile armchair
As I carry my laundry home alone.
The old Paris is no more (the form of a city
Changes too quickly, I have broken another heel getting drunk in a motel);

I don't see those old queens touting their broken camp anymore,
Their dry painted pouts and their fits.
The Arab grocery store owners stop up the pipes with greasy rags
And, ever brilliant for the camera, mangled Confucian odes.

The satellite was singing in the garden
About life as a Jew one morning, and the sour sky
Was cold and clear like on Thanksgiving, and slipping towards us
through the window
Was your sweet mouth and a sombre orangutang. In the silence
of the morning

A swan who had escaped from the offices of the heads of state
Holding in his feet a piece of concrete sidewalk
While the sun trailed off his white feathers like radio waves
Pressing a dry Russian river onto his tongue as he opened his beak

Came banging nervously
And said in a voice as clear as dog urine in bathwater
"When was the last time you had a bath? Why did you turn against
your father?"
I could see the mailbox was missing, it had fallen

Towards the sky several times before, like that guy Ovid talks about,
And there, ironically, was the sky, mocking me with its blue,
His feet up, his jaw flapping
—Coming on the dress I'd worn to visit God!


ii

Paris has change! but none dances in my melon
—No silver in my teeth! Palace nymphs, children in bandages, blocks,
Old cheesemakers, I've grown allergic to them all
And my chairs remember a time when I had the company of more
nurses than vultures.

The museums are for kangaroos now, and they've leapt onto my back
at their first opportunity.
I think now of the enormous swan, with its rubber foot
Laughing like an exile beneath a lemon tree.
I walked with a hard-on in a ditch, and there I found you

My laundromat, with more brass than a wig-maker's tomb.
Vile beetle, under the hand of the magical troupe of faggots
Baby-sitting the tumbleweeds in your ghostly toupee
Is the vulva's director breathing hellfire onto our ears at last!

I think of the woman who lost her two front teeth in a bakeshop, and so
she spoke with a lisp
Spitting on my feet on the boulevard, looking entirely like an oil painting
of Haggar the Horrible.
Those who make hats with the feathers missing dance "Le Freak"
better than any others,
Banging their asses loudly against the walls of the boiler room.

At five o'clock I forgot something I could not remember
About what Jesus had made in Jamaica! And those who hold back
their tears
And let a band play loudly in their heads like a good loaf of bread
—They're immigrants with secret violins of their own hidden away like
hairy flowers.

In the forest I went on a sexy dancing spree.
An old sow came to me across the plain, snuffling my clothes.
I think now about all the mushrooms we've forgotten on a desert isle,
Of their caps, of when the rain comes... and of Gene Autry's horse.



Falsely translated from Charles Baudelaire's
"Le Cygne," Les Fleurs Du Mal



David Cameron