Fragment (tr. by Alex Phillips and Paul Fattaruso)

FRAGMENT

. .. Someone who sleeps on grates in the subway

Someone who carries boxes

Who wakes before the day

Has washed the shadow from its windowpanes

Someone who has let himself be enchanted

By the rattles the fumes

And on his naked palpable stomach thinks he holds

A woman badly met

Someone who devours his hand

In a station splashed with colors

Of echoing alarm bells

Or who meticulously, without wanting to

Has put his portrait on the sheets of the Seine

And has seen it sink like a punctured barrel

Someone who persists in decorating the day

And paints the letters of his name

Climbs up to the egg of noon

The weather's fine comes down along the shiny canals

And on the drifting ice

Amid the Titanic's sinking beneath the hymns

Paints the day

Spells the letters of his name

Comes down to the stream to collect a reflection

To draw to the end of his magnet

Girls mutilated by rusty sickles

And by the laughter burnt by the black fire of diamonds. . .

Translated by Alex Phillips and Paul Fattaruso

Structure

28 lines · 3 stanzas