I
see this bird like Ovid exiled here
in Paris, its Black Sea-it spears and prods
its snake-head at our blue, ironic air,
as
if
it wanted to reproach the gods.
II
Paris changes; nothing in my melancholy
stirs ... new mansards, arrondisements razed
en bloc,
glass, scaffolding, slum wards-all allegory!
My memories are heavier than rock!
Here by the Louvre my symbol oppresses me:
I
think of the great swan hurled from the blue,
heroic, silly-like a refugee
dogged by its griping angst-also of you,
Andromache, fallen from your great bridegroom,
and now the concubine and baggage of Pyrrhus-–
you loiter wailing by the empty tomb,
Hector's widow and the last wife of Helenus!
I
think of you, tubercular and sick,
blindly stamping through puddles, Jeanne Duval,
peering into the Paris fog's thick wall
for the lost coconuts of Mozambique.
I
think of people who have lost the luck
they never find again, and waste their powers
like she-wolves giving grief a tit to suck,
or public orphans drying up like flowers;
and in this forest, on my downward drag,
myoId sorrow lets out its lion's roar.
I
think of Paris raising the white flag,
drowned sailors, fallen girls . . . and many more!
