Heureux ceux qui ont la clim
Pendant la grande canicule.
Heureux those whose culs are cool.
Heureuse her and heureux him.
C’est la canicule qui hurle,
Ready to tear you limb from limb.
Heureux ceux qui ont la clim,
Cri-criant: ‘O turlútuturle! ’
La situation est grim,
The mise-en-scène a trifle burle.
À chaleur disons donc: ‘Ta gueule! ’
And keep ourselves amused and slim.
West a business breast, North a morose jig, East a false
escape, South steam in milk.
North the great cat, East the great water, South the great
fire, West the great arrow.
East the uneager fingers, South the damp cave, West the
chained ankle, North the rehearsed cry.
Wondered Knob-Cracker at Stout-Heart:
‘Are you timed by your will, does your pulse
List credit, ready to slam like a till?
Can you keep it up? ’
Growled Beard Splitter to Smug:
‘Your forces delay, bibbing at Northern walls
While snow drives rifts between, barring the way.
I am sufficient. ’
The Doctor is glimpsed among his mulberry trees.
The dark fruits disfigure the sward like contusions.
He is at once aloof, timid, intolerant
Of all banalities of village life,
And yet is stupefied by loneliness.
From the beginning, the egg cradled in pebbles,
The drive thick with fledglings, to the known last
Riot of the senses, is only a short pass.
Earth to be forked over is more patient,
Bird hungers more, flower dies sooner.
He went to the city and goosed all the girls
With a stall on his finger for whittling the wills
To a clause in his favour and Come to me Sally,
One head in my chambers and one up your alley
And I am as old as my master.
We’re through, we’re through, we’re through, we’re through, we’re through
and — flanking, now, the edges of our schism —
it seems your coldness and my idealism
alone for all this time have kept us true.
Credulous I and hedonistic you:
opposed, refracting angles of a prism
who challenged sense with childish skepticism —
and every known the bulk of mankind knew.
As if the flow of the waters
From the triple streams of heavenly showers
So the sacred Ao of the eighth heavens
Whose flames have scorched the land.
Chorus:
Should our hearts’ love be restored
And our rights be ours once more
Then will our sacred beloved shoals of Kane
Be the firm foundation of the land.
Listen, Sanoe
Dewy lehua bud
Here I am
Waiting for your voice.
The answer comes
I am satisfied
Softly, sweetheart
You excite my whole being.
My body is waiting
Waiting there in yearning belief
How are we to fulfill
The desire of our thoughts?
Calling to you, my water lily
Budding for the two of us
Here close by is a compliment
The manu comes to deliver.
The Queen is listening
The aroma of the scents comes together
Mixes and rises upward
So similar, so alike.
The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows
pasted with colored squares, past the man
who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past
crates of doves and roosters veiled
until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets
with sulphur as people exchange gold
and silver foil, money to appease ghosts
who linger, needy even in death. I am
almost invisible. Hands could pass through me
effortlessly. This is how it is
to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows
untranslatable as the shop signs,
