POEMS
213
AND MORE CHANGES STILL
By force of suffering I lost the limits of my body and irresistably
gave up my form.
I was all things: ants especially, interminably in file, laborious
and yet hesitating. It was a terrific moving about. I had to give it
all my attention. I soon noticed that I was not only the ants, but also
their path. And after being crumbly and dusty at first, it became hard
and my suffering was horrible. I expected that at any moment it
would explode and be hurled into space. But it held firm.
I rested as well as I could on another part of me, a softer one.
This was a forest and the wind stirred
it
gently. But there came a
tempest, and the roots, to resist the increasing wind, bored into me,–
a mere trifle,-but went on to hook so deeply into me that it was
worse than death. A sudden fall of earth made a beach enter into me,
a pebbly beach. Then it began to ruminate inside me and that sum–
moned the sea, the sea.
Often I turned boa and, although a little troubled by the elonga–
tion, I would prepare to sleep or else I was a bison and would pre–
pare to graze, but soon from one shoulder came a typhoon, boats were
thrown into the air, the steamers wondered whether they would reach
port, only SOS's could be heard.
I regretted not being a boa or bison any more. A little later and
I had to shrink up so as to fit into a saucer. Always the changes were
abrupt, everything had to be made over, and that was not worth the
trouble, it would last only a few instants and yet you had to adapt
yourself, and always these abrupt changes. It is not so very trouble–
some to pass from a rhombohedron to a truncated pyramid, but it is
very troublesome to pass from a truncated pyramid to a whale; you
must know immediately how to dive, to breathe, and then the water
is cold, and then you find yourself face to face with the harpooners,
but I, as soon as I saw a man, fled. But
it
happened that I was sud–
denly transferred into a harpooner, then I had just as long again a
distance to go over. At last I succeeded in overtaking the whale, I ·
quickly launched a harpoon from the bow, well-sharpened and solid
(after having first made fast and checked the rope) ; the harpoon
darted, penetrated far into the _flesh, making an enormous wound.
I realized then that I was the whale, I had changed into it again,
there was a new opportunity to suffer, and I am not one who can get
used to suffering.
After a mad race I lost my life, then I was turned into a boat;
