The Flask

There are strong perfumes for which all materials
Are porous. Some say that they can penetrate glass.
While opening a chest brought from the Orient,
Whose lock grinds and squeaking, sticks,

Or, in an empty house, a cupboard
Full of the bitter smell of time, powdery and black
Sometimes one finds an old flask which remembers,
From which springs full alive returning life.

A thousand thoughts were sleeping, chrysalids interred
Quivering sweetly in the heavy shadows
Which unfurl their wings and take their flights
Tinted with blue, glazed with rose, scaled with gold.

Intoxicating memories flitter in the troubled air.
The eyes close;
Vertigo seizes the vanquished soul and drives it with both hands
to a chasm darkened by the decay of man.

And floors it on the edge of an age-old abyss
where, stinking Lazarus tearing at his shroud,
moves in its awakening the spectral corpse
of an old love, noxious, charming and sepulchral.

In the same way, when I am lost in the memory of men
In the corner of a sinister repository
When they have cast me aside, 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.