Every hand that touches me I greet
With kisses welcoming, caresses sweet.
Thus in my crystal's naked beauty, I--
With nothing save a little gold as on my lips a dye--
Give myself wholly to the mouth unknown
That seeks the burning of my own.
Queen of joy,--queen and slave,--
Mistress that taken passes on again,
Mocking the love she throws to still
Desire, I have blown madness at my pleasure's will
To the four winds that rave.
Say you that I am vain?
List!
I am feeble, scarcely I exist ...
Yet listen: for I can be everything.
This mouth, that never any kiss could close,
Capriciously in subtle fires it blows,
The jewelled garlands of a shadowy blossoming.
Tulip of gold or ruby, dense
Corolla of dark purple opulence,
Stem of a lilial diamond
Flowered upon a limpid pond
That nothing save the beak of wood-doves troubles,
I am sparkling, I am singing,--and I laugh to see,
Ascending in this colourless soul of me,
As might a dream, a thousand iridescent bubbles.
For the lover drunken on my lips that burn,
Whether he pour in turn
The wines of gold and flame or love's wave to my rim,
Drinks from my soul for ever strange to him
A queenly splendour or the radiance of the skies,
Or fury scorching where the harmful ruby lies
In the bitter counsel of my jealous topazes.
And, tears or joy, delirium, daring drunkenness,
From all this passion that to his is married
Nothing of me will gush unto his arid
Lips, save the simple and the limpid light
Whose gleam is wedded to my empty chalice.
What matter? I have given Desire his cloudland palace,
And on my courtesan's bare breast
Love lets the hope of his diaphanous flight
Languish, and softly rest ...
And I laugh, the fragile, frivolous sister of Eve!
For me in nights of madness drunken hands upheave
Higher than all foreheads to the constellated skies,
And then I am the sudden star of lies,
That into troubled joys darts deep its radiant gleam--
The sweet, perfidious happiness of Dream.