Shoju
There's room for chapeaux of rakish tilt, and degrees of concealment, as a pitcher turns in profile to hide his grasp of the pitch, the batsman coiled in his posturing. It isn't true that the pitch is a blur; it is merely bright and in rotation and in styled pace and vector on an axis we're a tangent to in flight. This is what a solstice is, minus the aggression: a tether of light between two related bodies from a sudden angle of sight. It's over as it's begun, and gorgeous in between. He owns that tense.
J'ai tendu des cordes de clocher à clocher; des guirlandes de fenêtre à fenêtre; des chaines d'or d'étoile à étoile, et je danse.
I stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to window; gold chains from star to star, and I dance.
Arthur Rimbaud
John Ashbery, translation
Illuminations
Fragments du feuillet 12
op. cit.
i André Ziehe
ii Anonymous Dutchman
I think Rimbaud never took any interest in the pursuit of anything of an athletic nature. However given the illustrations you have shown, dear Laurent, his interested might have changed.
ReplyDeleteHow did you happen to draw this impression of Rimbaud, Dink?
ReplyDeleteI have this impression because at an early age our young poet's behaviour was outwardly provocative and abandoned his hitherto characteristically neat appearance by allowing his hair to grow long.
ReplyDeleteAh, yes. Like Bjorn Borg, you mean.
ReplyDelete