The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

LOUIS ARAGON

The Embrace

ad 1905 Pablo
Picasso how old
Was he then twenty-three twenty-
four it was spring
Or perhaps autumn What matters is that here there reigns
The light of youth A room for
Entwined lovers needs nothing but a
Bed

It was
twelve years later that I arrived
Boulevard Saint-Germain 202 to visit Guillaume
Apollinaire From the distance came the coughing of
Big Bertha

Everything took on a tight-lipped air
The storeys spiralled about me on the staircase
It was like Robinson Crusoe’s tree
An eye
glittered in the spyhole of the door
And like

A plump bird clothed in the horizon the poet
In his socks welcomed me there in his nest
So here’s the Enchanter Where are the Seven Swords

Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform

I don’t remember anything not a single word
Nothing but that childish heart within me trembling
I had a little pale moustache and
My twenty years which brushed everything with their soft sound of wings
The sun’s paw in the shutters’ trap
And within me the cat of verse obscurely purring

I said to myself Guillaume it is time you came

He said to me What did he say And showed me round
With excuses The Picassos are in the cellar