To the Serpent

Painting by Voahangy


TO THE SERPENT

I have had occasion in the bewilderment
of cities to search for the right animal
to adore.
So I worked my way back to
the first times. Undoing cycles untying knots
crushing plots removing covers killing hostages
I searched.
Ferret. Tapir. Uprooter.
Where where where
the animal who warned me of floods
Where where where
the bird who led me to honey
Where where where
the bird who revealed to me the fountainheads
the memory of great alliances betrayed
great friendships lost through our fault
exalted me
Where where where
Where where where
The word made vulgar to me
O serpent sumptuous back do you enclose
in your sinuous lash the powerful soul
of my grandfather?
Greetings to you serpent
through whom morning shakes its beautiful
mango mauve December chevelure
and for whom the milk-invented night
tumbles its luminous mice down its wall
Greetings to you serpent
grooved like the bottom of the sea
and which my heart truly unbinds for us
like the premise of the deluge
Greetings to you serpent
your reputation is more majestic
than their gait and the peace their God
gives not you hold supremely.

Serpent delirium and peace

over the hurdles of a scurrilous wind
the countryside dismembers for me secrets
whose steps resounded at the outlet
of the millenary trap of gorges
that they tightened to strangulation.

to the trashcan! may they all rot in portraying
the banner of a black crow
weakening in a beating of white wings.

Serpent
broad and royal disgust overpowering
the return in the sands of deception
spindrift nourishing the vain raft of the seagull
in the pale tempest of reassuring silences you
the least frail warm yourself
You bathe yourself this side of the most
discordant cries on the dreamy spumes of grass
when fire is exhaled from the widow boat
that consumes the cape of the echo’s flash
just to make your successive deaths shiver
all the more—green frequenting of the elements—
your threat.

Your threat yes your threat body issuant
from the raucous haze of bitterness
where it corrupted the concerned lighthouse
keeper and that whistling takes its
little gallop time toward the assassin rays
of discovery.

Serpent
charming biter of womens’ breasts
and through whom death steals into the maturity
in the depths of a fruit sole lord lord alone
whose multiple image places on the strangler
fig’s altar the offering of a chevelure
that is an octopodal threat a sagacious hand
that does not pardon cowards


Aime Cesaire

Translation from French by Clayton Eshleman & A. James Arnold
Posted over on Jerome Rothenberg's site Poems & Poetics