ROBERT DESNOSAnd if some day you remember
O form and name of my love,
One day on the ocean between America and Europe,
At the hour when the last sunbeam reverberates on the undulating surface of
waves, or else a stormy night beneath a tree in the countryside or in a speeding
car,
A spring morning on the boulevard Malesherbes,
A rainy day,
At dawn before sleeping,
Tell yourself, I command your familiar spirit, that I alone loved you more and
that it is sad you should not have known it.
Tell yourself one must not regret things: Ronsard before me and Baudelaire
have sung the regrets of ladies old or dead who despised the purest love.
When you are dead
You will be beautiful and always desirable
I will already be dead, enclosed forever complete within your immortal body,
in your astonishing image present forever among the constant marvels of life and
of eternity, but if I live
Your voice and its tone, your look and its radiance,
Your fragrance, the scent of your hair and many other things besides will still
live in me,
Who am neither Ronsard nor Baudelaire,
I who am Robert Desnos and who for having known and loved you,
Am easily their equal.
I who am Robert Desnos, to love you
Wanting nothing else to be remembered by on the despicable earth.
—mary ann caws
If You Knew
Far from me and like the stars, the sea, and all the props of poetic
legend,
Far from me and present all the same, yet unaware,
Far from me and still more silent in my endless imagining,
Far from me, my lovely mirage and my eternal dream, you cannot know.
If you knew.
Far from me and perhaps still farther being unaware of me and still unaware.
Far from me for you doubtless do not love me or, not so di√erent, I doubt
your love.
Far from me for you cleverly ignore my passionate desires.
Far from me for you are cruel.
If you knew.