“Zone” Guillaume Apollinaire In the end you’ve had enough of the ancient world O Eiffel Tower shepherdess today your bridges are a bleating flock You’ve had it up to here with the Greeks and Romans Here even the automobiles look antique Only religion remains new religion Retains the simplicity of an airport hangar Alone in Europe you are not antiquated O Christianity The most modern man in Europe is you Pope Pius X While you whom the windows watch are too ashamed To enter a church and confess your sins today You read handouts pamphlets posters sing to you from up high There’s your morning poetry and for prose there are the newspapers Paperback police thrillers for twenty-five centimes Portraits of the great a thousand and one titles This morning I saw a pretty little street whose name I forget Clean and new it seemed the clarion of the sun Executives workers and beautiful stenographers Pass this way four times a day from Monday morning to Saturday night Three times each morning a siren whines An angry bell at noon Billboards signs and murals Shriek like parakeets I love the grace of this industrial street In Paris between the rue Aumont-Thiéville and the avenue des Ternes Look how young the street is and you still only a toddler Your mother dresses you in blue and white You are very religious you and your old pal René Dalize You love nothing more than church ceremonies It’s nine o’clock the gas turns blue you sneak out of the dormitory You stay up all night praying in the school chapel Under a globed amethyst worthy of adoration The halo around the head of Christ revolves forever He is the lovely lily that we cultivate The red-haired torch immune to any wind The pale and scarlet son of the mother of many sorrows The evergreen tree ever hung with prayers The twin gallows of honor and eternity The six-pointed star God who dies on Friday and revives on Sunday Christ who climbs heavens higher than any aviator can reach He holds the world’s aviation record Christ pupil of my eye Pupil of twenty centuries he knows what he’s doing And changed into a bird this century like Jesus soars in the air Devils in abysses lift their heads to stare Look they say he takes after Simon Magus of Judea They say he can steal but can also steal away The angels vault past the all-time greatest pole vaulters Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana Gather around the first airplane Or make way for the elevation of those who took communion The priests rise eternally as they raise the host And the airplane touches down at last its wings outstretched From heaven come flying millions of swallows Ibises flamingoes storks from Africa The fabled Roc celebrated by storytellers and poets With Adam’s skull in its claws the original skull Messenger from the horizon the eagle swoops and screams And from America the little hummingbird From China the long and supple pihis Who have one wing each and fly in pairs Here comes the dove immaculate spirit Escorted by lyre-bird and vain peacock And the phoenix engendering himself from the flames Veils everything for a moment with his sparkling cinders The sirens leave the perilous seas And sing beautifully when they get here all three of them And all of them eagle phoenix and pihi of China Befriend our flying machine Now you are walking in Paris all alone among the crowds Herds of bellowing buses roll by you Love’s anguish grips you by the throat As if you were fated never again to be loved In the bad old days you would have entered a monastery You feel ashamed when you slip and catch yourself saying prayers You mock yourself your laughter crackles like hellfire The sparks flash in the depths of your life Like a painting in a dreary museum You’ve got to get as close to it as you can Today as you walk around Paris and her bloodstained women It was (and I would just as soon not remember it was) the demise of beauty Surrounded by flames our Lady looked down on me at Chartres The blood of thy sacred heart drowned me in Montmartre I am sick of hearing the blessed words The love I suffer from is a shameful disease And my image of you survives in my anguish and insomnia It’s always near you and then it fades away Now you’re at the Mediterranean shore Under the lemon groves in flower all year long You go sailing with your friends One is from Nice one from Menton two Turbiasques The creatures of the deep terrify us The fish swimming through seaweed is the symbol of our Savior You’re in the garden of a tavern on the outskirts of Prague You’re in heaven a rose is on the table Which you look at instead of writing your poems or your prose You look at the bug asleep in the heart of the rose You recognize yourself in the mosaics of St. Vitus You almost died of grief that day You were Lazarus crazed by daylight In the Jewish quarter the hands on the clocks go backward And you creep forward through the story of your life Climbing to the Hradchin in the evening and listening To the Czech songs in the cafés Here you are in Marseilles amid the watermelons Here at Koblenz at the Hotel of the Giant Here in Rome sitting under a Japanese medlar tree Here you are in Amsterdam with a woman who you think is beautiful but is really ugly She will wed a student from Leyden You can rent rooms by the hour Cubicula locanda I remember the three days I spent there and the three at Gouda You are in Paris summoned before a judge Arrested like a common criminal You journeyed in joy and despair Before you encountered lies and old age Love made you suffer at twenty at thirty I’ve lived like a fool and wasted my time You no longer dare to look at your hands and now I feel like crying Over you over the one I love over everything that has scared you Eyes full of tears you look at the immigrant families They believe in God they pray the women nurse their babies They fill the Gare St. Lazare with their smell Their faith in the stars rivals that of the three magi They’re hoping to gain some argent in the Argentine And return to the old country with a fortune One family takes a red eiderdown with it as you take your heart wherever you go This eiderdown and our dreams are equally unreal Some refugees stay in furnished rooms In the rue des Rosiers or the rue des Écouffes in the slums I have seen them at night walking Like pieces on a chessboard they rarely move Especially the Jews whose wives wear wigs And sit quietly in the back of the shop You stand at the counter of a seedy café A cup of coffee for a couple of sous with the other outcasts At night you go to a famous restaurant These women aren’t cruel they’re just wretched Each even the ugliest has made her lover suffer She is the daughter of a policeman from Jersey I hadn’t noticed the calluses on her hand I feel sorry for her and the scars on her belly I humble my mouth to the poor girl with the horrid laugh You’re alone day breaks The milkmen clink their bottles The night slinks away like a half-breed beauty Ferdine the false Leah on the lookout The brandy you sip burns like your life Your life that you drink like an eau-de-vie You are walking toward Auteuil you intend to walk the whole way home To sleep with your fetishes from Oceania and Guinea There are Christs in different forms and other systems of belief But Christs all the same though lesser though obscure Farewell farewell Let the sun beheaded be
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 08:29:17 +0000
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