To Her Who Is Too Gay
Your head, your gesture, your air
Are beautiful as a beautiful landscape;
The smile plays in your face
Like a fresh wind in a clear sky.
The fleeting care that you brush against
Is dazzled by the health
Which leaps like clarity
From your arms and your shoulders.
The re-echoing colors
Which you scatter in your toilet
Cast in the hearts of poets
The image of a ballet of flowers.
These silly clothes are the emblem
Of your many-colored spirit;
Silly woman of my infatuation,
I hate as much as love you!
Sometimes in a pretty garden
Where I dragged my weakness,
I have felt the sun like irony
Tear my chest;
And the spring and the green of things
Have so humbled my heart,
That I have punished a flower
For the insolence of Nature.
Thus I would wish, one night,
When the voluptuary's hour sounds,
To crawl like a coward, noiselessly,
Towards the treasures of your body,
In order to correct your gay flesh
And beat your unbegrudging breast,
To make upon your starting thigh
A long and biting weal,
And, sweet giddiness,
Along those newly-gaping lips
More vivid and more beautiful,
Inject my venom, O my sister!
— Geoffrey Wagner, Selected Poems of Charles Baudelaire (NY: Grove Press, 1974)
