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PARTISAN REVIEW
LOUIS CUREL DE LA SORGUE
Sorgue, you who advance behind a shimmering curtain of butter–
flies, with your sickle of a loyal dean in your hand, the pot-hook of
torment like a collar at your neck, to finish your man's day, when shall
I wake up and be happy to the modeled rhythm of your irreproachable
rye? Blood and sweat have taken up their battle which will go on until
evening, until your return, solitude of wider and wider margins. The
weapon of your masters, the time-piece of the tides, finally decomposes.
Creation and laughter are dissociated. The air-king announces himself.
Sorgue, your shoulders like an open book propagate their text. Child,
you have been the bridegroom of that wayside flower traced in the rock
and which escaped by a wasp. Today, bent over, you observe the agony
of the persecutor who tore from the lover of earth the cruelty of num–
berless ants in order to throw it in millions of murderers against yours
and your hope. Crush again the cancerous egg that resists. . . .
There's a man standing upright now, a man in a field of rye, a
field like a machine-gunned choir, a saved field.
AGE OF HEARTS
Lovely age of vacations
Age of open casements
of pores illumined by the bath
Age of hearts with no ballast
but the wet sand
carved by each beat of the tide
into a fortress
Lovely age of sand
illumined each moment by the tide
refreshed by the bath
Age of open hearts
neither etched nor moistened
by any acid of remorse
Age of sand strewn in profusion
by the crenellations of the fortress
Age of hearts
which the sea carves grain by grain
RENE
CHAR
MICHEL LEIRIS
(The poems by Queneau, Frenaud, du Pin, Char and L eiris are
translated by Barbara Gibbs).
