Slow Drunk Boat
Hey Cori, I snapped the supermoon.
It’s not all illusion, running an empty
Acoustic mini-guitar shop. Plenty
Of stains on this little heart. More soon.
*
Plenty of planking. I made myself crazed.
The hemispheres keep seizing up.
In the arctic, a seahorse is freezing up.
Little black moon, in your shadow I’m dazed.
*
I started to write, “O cruel July,
O July is the cruelest month.”
I’m repeating myself. I slump
And the beatings repeat themselves coolly.
*
Malcolm Lowry locked in a cabin,
Warhol stars on skylight display.
The funnels burn as the clouds go gray.
Lacy black tones of celestial rapine.
*
“Doing eighty and she slammed on the brakes,”
The gendarme joked, writing the ticket.
I was the sense that shook in the thicket.
Fifty versions of me, fifty trembling mistakes.
*
And only one Pantagruel rutting.
And only one hurricane swamping
The civic geography. Lamping,
Cold lamping, and Behemoth strutting
*
For a long time I filed reports early
Regarding the eternal descent
Of blue that does not move. I went
To bed, waiting for nothing, surly.
*
I have only one regret, Europe.
I missed your ancient parapets.
I’m lying. I have a lot of regrets.
Not so much about tourism, sure enough.
*
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Archipelagoes off the shoulder of Orion.
And the islands—but once again I’m lying.
I have seen stars that led me to grief.
*
Doesn’t the sky. Doesn’t the sky shake
Deliriously. That time it tore me open.
Now I go from here to there hoping
Its lacy days resound for someone’s sake.
*
Because me or somebody’s still found
At the bottom of the night. So easy
To say, if saying sleep is easy:
“If saying sleep,” the exile droned.
*
Hey Cori, here’s a million gilded
Birds behind a wheezing door.
Or did I mean a freezing seahorse, or
Is this the snarling future we builded?
Translator's Note:
This translation of a portion of Le Bateau Ivre was undertaken to celebrate Drunken Boat’s anniversary. For my part, I adhered to a simple principle of extension and elaboration: each one of Rimbaud’s lines would be rendered as its own rhyming quatrain, thus quadrupling the length of the poem. Along the way, I engaged in a mélange of relatively faithful rendering Rimbaud’s French into English, cross-linguistic punning and homophonic translation, free association, and outright invention.
