Poems of Jules Laforgue
Born in South America, school in rural France, employed in Germany, Jules Laforgue died at the age of 27, but not before influencing Pound, Eliot, and Hart Crane with the pyrotechnics of his verse. These are three of his early works, followed by his final poem, translated by two poets in their twenties.
More on Jules Lafogue can be found in H.T. Kirby-Smith's Origins of Free Verse (University of Michigan Press, 1996).
Every October I start to get upset. The factories' hundred throats blow smoke to the sky. The pullets are getting fat for Christmas Day. So I'll bray at our bleached and atrophied souls and melt a thousand icebergs over the old scrolls, the frightened mysticisms of religions. Find a decent spirit? Pretty hard. Legitimacy? Sure. It's a well-kept yard, But who's gonna bless our kitchens till the end? I'll say my prayers again to the Ice Age Snow, and cry to the wind, "You too, you crooked old fart!" 'cause nothing'll take a load off you like that. (And with the Snow, falls pity. The withering kind. Those folks you always see with the hearts of leather? Someone should throw them a line, but will they ever?) So, yeah. You can tear at your ears, but it's a fool's sport. 'Cause nothing--not the seasons, art, the skies-- is worth two cents of skirt and a pair of eyes. Look, sweet. Two cents of skirt and a still-warm zipper and two cents worths of looks and what comes after . . . surely that's the remedy for ennui. Watercolor in Five Minutes Ophelia: 'Tis brief, my lord. Hamlet: As woman's love.Uh oh. The weather is curdling. A storm is not far off. The kind that sends you hurdling back to the hayloft. The blister pops! The drencher drops! In scrimmages of deluges! O! The swarm and swelling of umbrellas! O! The Old Earth Mother's in a bother! Out my window one pariah of a fuchsia feels renewed. Little Prayer Without Pretensions Our Father who art in Heaven, way up there, O Infinite, Eternally Inconceivable, give us this day our daily bread, or, better, let us sit for a little while at Thy Table. What dost thou take us for then? Piddling infants from whom Thou must keep hidden the Serious Stuff? Yes, and Thy Will be done . . . by sycophants on Earth as it is in Heaven. How oppressive. Lead us not with Thy Knowing Smiles, at least, into temptation to kiss Thy Holy Ghost. Leave us in peace, dead to that better life, to graze our swatch of earth, to fuck, to laugh . . . to graze our swatch of earth, to fuck, to laugh. --translated by Browning Porter Last Poems, XII Black north wind, barking rain, and black river, and shut-up houses, whole neighborhoods like morgues, and the Backward always lagging all heartache and this junk, and the innocents dragging their stains and calling the rain: "Drench, soak my blazing heart, my flesh which is so interesting!" She, my heart and so forth, what's she doing? If she's out on the street in this villainous weather from what too-human histories will she re-enter? And if she's inside, tossing because of this hard wind, does she think of pleasure, of pleasure at any price, saying: "My heart rots, misunderstood--anything rather? Take care, take care, hounded heart out there. (Boredom, debility, nervous twitch, strife, the misery of wanting to be our wife!) Homeland, family, and the soul dizzy, lathed on high-minded destinies beyond what sainted old maids we have today. Black night, high walls, hard wind, get to a convent, a convent! The convent of my birthplace (hardly twenty thousand souls) between the high school and town offices, vis-a-vis the cathedral with unknowns in grey robes praying, taking stitches and that suffices-- despising without desire all that isn't this way, vestal, provincial, every step glacial. Only floors will know your face. No! I can't see you in step, sequestered, languishing in that closed chamber and your mournful instinctive gesture muffled, incapable of crying murder! No, this cannot be and it may not be, no, you aren't like the others, all bent to their windows, photosynthetically, till the sun beds down in its bloodwallow sprawl. No, you aren't of age, tell me you'll never be of age, engage yourself to stay unchanged, like letters on a page. The night is black as never, the wind breathes, grandly sad, both stick the same old ballad in one's head: a couple by the fireside, snugly cornered, racing through the hymnal-- from wedding straight to funeral-- but you, you don't have to abandon you to these villainous two, these great pities of November! Stay in your small chamber, unmelted, icy, your fine eyes averted irreconcilably. No, she's out in the depth of the night, that dazzling tradeshow where all's robotic, routinized! We'll die, qiuck or slow. Well, then, for loving whatever story lies back of the dark lashes of my orphan heroine, Nature, give me the force and courage to think myself of age. Give me the effrontery! Since life's a memento mori. --translated by Leigh Palmer 
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