PAUL VALÉRYSelf-love, self-hatred, what’s the di√erence?
Its secret mordancy is so intense
the silent gnawing goes by many names.
Watching, desiring, nibbling, considering,
it likes the flesh and, even, in my dreams,
I live on su√erance of this ravenous thing.
Zeno, harsh theorist of conceptual zero,
have you transfixed me with your winged arrow
which quivers, flies, yet doesn’t fly at all?
Does the twang wake me and the arrow kill?
Sunlight, is it merely a tortoise-shade,
the mighty hero frozen in mid-stride?
No, no; get up; go on to the next phase—
body, shake o√ this meditative pose
and, chest, inhale the first flap of the air.
A palpable new freshness o√ the sea,
an ozone rush, restores my soul to me
and draws me down to the reviving shore.
Great sea endowed with frenzy and sensation,
slick panther-hide and heaving vegetation
sown with a million images of the sun;
unchained monster drunk on your blue skin,
chewing for ever your own glistening tail
in a perpetual, silent-seeming turmoil—
the wind rises; it’s time to start. A sti√ breeze
opens and shuts the notebook on my knees
and powdery waves explode among the rocks
flashing; fly o√, then, my sun-dazzled pages
and break, waves, break up with ecstatic surges
this shifting surface where the spinnaker flocks!
—derek mahon