Imaginary bodies: Selection #7

(I was looking at everything in the other's face, the other's body, coldly: lashes, toenail, thin eyebrows, thin lips, the luster of the eyes, a mole, a way of holding a cigarette; I was fascinated — fascination being, after all, only the extreme of detachment — by a kind of colored ceramicized, vitrified figurine in which I could read, without understanding anything about it, the cause of my desire.)

The curve of your eyes embraces my heart
A ring of sweetness and dance
halo of time, sure nocturnal cradle,
And if I no longer know all I have lived through
It’s that your eyes have not always been mine.

I descended to the garden and saw an admirable statue before me. It was truly a Venus, and of marvelous beauty. The upper part of the body was nude, as great divinities were usually represented by the ancients. The right hand was raised as high as the breast, the palm turned inwards, the thumb and two first fingers extended, and the others slightly bent. (...)

M. Alphonse drew me into the embrasure of a window, and, turning away his eyes, said,-
“You will laugh at me- But I don’t know what is the matter with me…I am bewitched!” (...)
“You know about my ring?” he continued, after a pause.
“Well, has it been stolen?”
“No.”
“Then you have it?”
“No-I-I cannot get if off the finger of that Infernal Venus.”
“You did not pull hard enough.”
“Yes, indeed I did– But the Venus- she has bent her finger.”

Yes, I too would like my crown of thorns
and one for every thought, red hot, across
my brown, right into my brain to the frail roots
where sins and forged dreams writhe
within me, through me

Émile Verhaeren, "The crown", Les Débâcles, 1888

She always walked under the arches of nights
And everywhere she went
She left
The mark of broken things.

Paul Éluard, Capital of Pain, 1926

As for her, I might as well never have laid eyes on her before. She sat all huddled and muffled up, her head sunk, the muff with her hands in her lap, her legs pressed tight together, her heels clear of the ground. Shapeless, ageless, almost lifeless, it might have been anything or anyone, an old woman or a little girl.