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The Drunken Boat

As I was floating down unconcerned RiversI no longer felt myself steeredby the haulers:Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targetsNailing them

naked to coloured stakes.

I cared nothing for all my crews,Carrying Flemish wheat or Englishcottons. When, along with my haulers those uproars were done with The

Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased.

Into the ferocious tide-ripsLast winter, more absorbed than the minds ofchildren,I ran! And the unmoored Peninsulas Never endured more

triumphant clamourings

The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings.Lighter than a cork, Idanced on the waves Which men call eternal rollers of victims, For ten

nights, without once missing the foolish eye of the harbor lights!

Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children,The green waterpenetrated my pinewood hull And washed me clean of the bluish wine-stains and the splashes of vomit,Carrying away both rudder and anchor.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and

churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallidflotsam,A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down;

Where, suddenly dyeing the bluenesses, deliriumsAnd slow rhythms underthe gleams of the daylight, Stronger than alcohol, vaster than music

Ferment the bitter rednesses of love!

I have come to know the skies splitting with lightnings, and thewaterspouts And the breakers and currents; I know the evening,And Dawnrising up like a flock of doves,And sometimes I have seen what men have

imagined they saw!

I have seen the low-hanging sun speckled with mystic horrors.Lighting uplong violet coagulations, Like the performers in very-antique dramas

Waves rolling back into the distances their shiverings of venetian blinds!

I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled snowsThe kiss risingslowly to the eyes of the seas,The circulation of undreamed-of saps, And

the yellow-blue awakenings of singing phosphorus!

I have followed, for whole months on end, the swellsBattering the reefslike hysterical herds of cows, Never dreaming that the luminous feet of

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the MarysCould force back the muzzles of snorting Oceans!

I have struck, do you realize, incredible FloridasWhere mingle withflowers the eyes of panthersIn human skins! Rainbows stretched like

bridlesUnder the seas' horizon, to glaucous herds!

I have seen the enormous swamps seething, trapsWhere a whole leviathanrots in the reeds!Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calmAnd

distances cataracting down into abysses!

Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!Hideouswrecks at the bottom of brown gulfsWhere the giant snakes devoured by

verminFall from the twisted trees with black odours!

I should have liked to show to children those dolphinsOf the blue wave,

those golden, those singing fishes.- Foam of flowers rocked my driftingsAnd at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.

Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones,The sea whose sobssweetened my rollingsLifted its shadow-flowers with their yellow sucking

disks toward meAnd I hung there like a kneeling woman...

Almost an island, tossing on my beaches the brawlsAnd droppings of pale-eyed, clamouring birds,And I was scudding along when across my frayed

cordage Drowned men sank backwards into sleep!

But now I, a boat lost under the hair of coves,Hurled by the hurricaneinto the birdless ether, I, whose wreck, dead-drunk and sodden with

water,neither Monitor nor Hanse ships would have fished up;

Free, smoking, risen from violet fogs,I who bored through the wall of thereddening sky Which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious,

Lichens of sunlight [mixed] with azure snot,

Who ran, speckled with lunula of electricity,A crazy plank, with black

sea-horses for escort, When Julys were crushing with cudgel blows Skiesof ultramarine into burning funnels;

I who trembled, to feel at fifty leagues' distanceThe groans of Behemoth'srutting, and of the dense MaelstromsEternal spinner of blue immobilitiesI

long for Europe with it's aged old parapets!

I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islandsWhose delirious skies areopen to sailor: - Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights,

Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future? -

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.Every

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moon is atrocious and every sun bitter: Sharp love has swollen me up withheady langours. O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!

If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the Black cold pool where intothe scented twilightA child squatting full of sadness, launchesA boat as

fragile as a butterfly in May.

I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves,Sail in the wake of thecarriers of cottons,Nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants,Nor

pull past the horrible eyes of the hulks.