In her dress, colour of fire and poison
the corpse of my reason
drags down the Thames.
Bridges of bronze, where coaches clatter
with the ceaseless clanking of hinges
and the sails of sullen craft
over her let their shadows pass.
Without a moving hand on its dial
a great belfry, masked in crimson
regards her, like someone
immensely sunk in grief and loss.
She is dead for knowing too much,
from an excessive desire to sculpt the cause
in the pedestal of dark granite,
of every being and every object.
She is dead, horrifically,
of an ingenious poisoning.
Dead too from a journey of delirium
towards an absurd red kingdom.
Her nerves are shattered,
some evening lit by celebrations
when she already felt triumph glide
above her head like eagles.
She is dead of exhaustion,
her ardour and her will ground to dust
and it’s she who killed herself,
endlessly worn out.
Along the gloomy walls,
along factories of iron
whose hammers tan the lightning flash
she drags herself to her funeral.
These are the quays and the barracks,
always the quays and their lanterns,
motionless, slow spinners
of the veiled gold of their lights;
these are the sorrows of stones,
houses of brick, keeps in darkness
whose windows, downcast eyelids,
are opened in evening’s mists;
these are the great dockyards of panic,
crammed with dismantled ships
and dismembered yard-arms
against a sky of crucifixion.
In her dress of dead jewels, solemnized
by the purple hour on the horizon,
the corpse of my reason
drags down the Thames.
She sets out towards chances,
to the depths of shadows and fogs,
through the dull sound of the lowering bells,
breaking their wing on the corners of towers.
Behind her leaving unappeased
the sprawling town of life;
she sets out for the dark unknown,
to sleep in evening’s tombs,
out there, where waves slow and strong
open their boundless chasms,
swallow for all eternity –
the dead.