The Seekers of Lice
When the child’s forehead, cursed with furies, red blisters, pines for a forgetful swarm of pathetic dreams,
there steps to his bed two rangy, highborn sisters
—silver nails extended from refined, slender limbs.
They fix the child in a chair before a window
showing on the blue air that bathes fecund meadows;
they drive, through hair matted with sweat and morning dew, their charming, delicate fingers, cruel as new snow.
He hears their sibilance, their halting song, their breath thick with honey odor, vegetable, roseate,
broken here and there by their spittle’s sucked hisses, their plays for kisses thwarted, stillborn, celibate.
He hears black eyelashes flutter in the perfumed silence; their electric fingers craft paradise,
a half-drunk indolence, while through the humid room crackle the royal nails crushing the little lice.
But then: the wine of Sloth rises in him; the sigh of a harmonica bruises the azure sky.
The tympanic flows of their fingers catalyze, surging, dying, surging in him—the need to cry.
1870-1872
No comments:
Post a Comment