Rimbaud

Rimbaud
He threw away this trash
I envy his saying no to this work
to this cheerless masturbation
I don't give a damn about beauty
with her chancre
I don't care about perversion or conversion.
No to magic. Yes as ever to the ever-deceiving proof of
......what is
and what words scratch, and that
I also poetize
This is a bad habit you can only break the way he did,
......scornfully
and he could, in fact, block himself in his neurosis
and lose his tongue at the hands of the plague
and that not being a yes to the lust of the plague

All roads lead me to the impenetrable
to what's good for nothing
Poetry guilty perhaps of what exists
So many words for each thing
such an excess of rhetoric even on the least little ant

But he threw away this trash once and  for all
his fierce hat in the woods.


by Enrique Lihn
from The Dark Room;
New Directions Books,1963

translation: Jonathan Cohen, John Felstiner, and David Unger