THIS water hardly keeps a memory of its sources.
In arteries of cement
It has glided dizzy courses
Towards this city which will be its ocean.

- You see emigrants along the docks,
They have this look of beaten cattle.-

Followed by blows of menacing machines,
It has writhed in leaden corsets,
Driven on to the assault of houses,
And pleating its snoring shivers on their spines.
It is so frightfully anonymous,
It has no personal taste,
And nothing intimate it kept
After the reservoirs of Babel.

Now it is here,
In this enamelled vase
Of an improbable ultramarine,
It is here like a dead water with no history;
You feel it never mirrored anything,
You feel that it has run through territories,
And run through fields of salt, and never tasted them;
It is indifferent and sleeps at random,
And knows of nature only the wrong side.

Then, ten little azure jets
Dance in a circle under the vase.
This scarcely looks like fire,
And yet indeed is fire:
- There were mosses as well as oaks,
There were ferns as well as palm-trees,
Warm wind, aromatized by oceans nigh,
And red sun in the sky;
There was at that time all the forests
Greeting the dawn with their crowns, beyond the heavens ...

Surely, but all these things are deeply dead,
And somewhere corpses must be being tormented;
Therefore ten little azure will-o'-the-wisps
Gossip in a circle under the vase.
This scarcely looks like fire,
It neither has its manners nor attire,
It is a debonair, obedient company
Which slyly lisps,
And falls back in good order when commanded.

Then falls the water into its abyss of sadness.

Sometimes the city whips
Its childish regiment of window-panes;
The water scarcely trembles, scarcely takes it ill.

And yet a dream encumbers it,
A dream of a pond, at dusk,
With a flock of vapours, like shadows,
That dramatize their spiral play in the dark.

And truly, twisted, on its face,
Phantoms rise from place to place.

Then, a great inquietude invades it:
Someone with insistence strikes the bottom of the vase.
Where is it? Ah! if it could but return!
Quickly, return to the springs it came from!
Pass again through the brute hands of machines,
But yet return!

It is too late, a fry of little pearls
Spontaneously at the bottom dawn;
The vase, which trembles,
Lets them loose by handfuls,
They sail away, and, suddenly, it is the void,
And the short sobs of souls resigned.

Beneath, the memory of the forests of the ancient world.
Ah! yes, ten azures will-o'-the-wisps in a circle clamour.

They say, the wicked tongues,
They say the water is singing.
- But the forced virgin does not sing,
It weeps its torture,
And its bad liberty for ever lost.

It knows now that it might have then descended,
Processioning under the poplar's gaze,
And that, in deltas, ocean languishes with waiting for this message
Of olden continents forgotten.

What matter if, in tropic countries, sound
The hollow gulfs with sulphur and volcanoes bound ...

This water is the prisoner of things,
And must alone for men.

But of a sudden it has found its pride again,
And climbs, and foams, and presses forward in a crowd of heads,
And the vanished thing with the bursten eyes
Is drunk with simulation of a storm.

translated by Jethro Bithell