The Flask (rough)

There are strong perfumes for which all material
Is porous. One would say that they penetrate glass
In opening a chest come from the East
Of which the lock grinds and balks in crying

Or in an empty house some cupboard
Full of the bitter smell of time, powdery and black
Sometimes one finds an old flask which remembers
From where springs all alive a soul which comes back

A thousand thoughts were sleeping, funeral chrysalids
Shaking sweetly in the heavy shadows
Which unfurl their wing and take their flight
Tinted with blue, glazed with rose, laminated with gold

See there the intoxicating memory which flutters
into the troubled air. The eyes close;
Vertigo seizes the vanquished soul and pushes it with both hands
to a chasm darkened by human miasmas

It lands it on the edge of a centuried abyss
where, stinking Lazarus tearing his shroud,
moves in its awakening the spectral corpse
Of an old love, rancid, charming and sepulchral

In the same way, when I am lost in the memory of men
In the corner of a sinister wardrobe
When they have thrown me, an old flask
Desolate, decrepit, powdery, dirty, despicable, viscous, broken.

I shall be your coffin, lovable pestilence
The witness of your force and of your virulence
Dear poison prepared by the angels
Liqueur which eats away at me
Oh, the life, and the death, of my heart.