Poem for Tuesday

Le Sonnet Du Trou Du Cul
By Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud

Obscur et froncé comme un oeillet violet
Il respire, humblement tapi parmi la mousse
Humide encor d'amour qui suit la pente douce
Des fesses blanches jusqu'au bord de son ourlet.

Des filaments pareils à des larmes de lait
Ont pleuré, sous l'auteur cruel qui les repousse,
A travers de petits caillots de marne rousse,
Pour s'en aller où la pente les appelait.

Ma bouche s'accouple souvent à sa ventouse
Mon âme, du coït matériel jalouse,
En fit son lamier fauve et son nid de sanglots

C'est l'olive pâmée et la flûte câline
C'est le tube où descend la céleste praline
Chanaan féminin dans les moiteurs éclos.

Sonnet to the Asshole
By Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud
Translated by Alan Stone

Like a mauve carnation puckered up and dim
it breathes, meekly nestled amid the foam,
damp, too, from caresses tracing the smooth dome
of creamy buttocks up to the innermost rim.

Filaments oozing like drops of milk, driven
by the pitiless south wind, are blown
back across the russet marl's small stones
to vanish where the white slope sucks them in.

My mouth mates often with this air hole.
Jealous of this carnal union, my soul
fashions its nest of musky tears and sobs.

It's the drunken olive, the cajoling flute,
the heavenly praline's earthward chute,
feminine Canaan mid come bursting in gobs.

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You can thank the most lovely and wicked for that poem, as she brought me a book of Verlaine in French and English and that's the one I can least resist since she also brought porn and fic and stuff. *g* We had California Tortilla for lunch and then went shopping and to Great Falls, which was drizzly and cool (and the water both in the canal and the river seemed absurdly low) but still gorgeous as ever and there were a great blue heron and kayaker in the Potomac and what more can anyone ask, really!

In the morning before her arrival, I went to my younger son's school for the fourth grade wax museum, in which kids dress up as different historical figures and give a spiel about their lives when you press the "button" pinned to their clothing. Mine was Thomas Edison, and and I were both amused that he talked about the fact that Edison's first experiment, an attempt to incubate goose eggs, was a dismal failure when he sat on the eggs and they cracked. That is so something younger son would try himself. We also met "Andrew Jackson", "George Washington Carver", "Juliet Low", "David Beckham" and other entertaining figures.

I rushed two Trek articles in the evening (M:I-3 stinking up the box office, which is Trek news since J.J. Abrams directed it but I suspect it has lots more to do with Tom Cruise and the franchise than the director, British mathematicians propose cloaking technology) and put away a whole pile of books threatening to collapse the dining room table. Now if only other people who lived in this house would do the same. It is the wrong night of the month for me to be chipper, so I shall depart with daily photos and schmoopy kisses for and go to bed!


I urgently need for younger son to wear a button promising to do this ALL THE TIME.


Jane Goodall and Paul Cézanne study their note cards.


And a kayaker in a colorful kayak on a gray day at Great Falls.