Marthe Reed

 

Three After Swann

            I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep

 

1
a whole series of rooms
one time or another
my body

loyally preserving
glowing in the panes of
a different kind of pleasure

the successive theories
in which I had slept
the long course

shot with
heat
as gusts

the moonlight
of my bed
might be

its ceiling
partly walled
as though I were not there

tenanted in the quiet
shape of
flowering

still
no good my
waking, if

not caught
in their possible
presence

now
set in motion
and the rest


2
in some inferior
object
effectively lost

a shudder
an exquisite
origin

indifferent to me
which love
or rather this

mediocre, accidental, mortal
less than
but in myself

seeking
this unremembered
resistance

of what
old
forms of things

the power of expansion
subsists
immediately the old

weathers
stretch themselves and bend
so

all the flowers
and the whole
of it


 

3
the pale flowers opened
altered their own
wings

like a book in which one is astonished
indeed
grown old

a metamorphosis
hung like
radiance

on warm evenings of spring
still their colour
the savour

of lemon-wood
bounded by the window
would read in it

concentric waves of
the small
darkness

 


to go back to the home page