Eyes, lakes of my simple passion to be reborn <br />Other than as the actor who gestures with his hand <br />As with a pen, and evokes the foul soot of the lamps, <br />Here’s a window in the walls of cloth I’ve torn. <br /> <br />With legs and arms a limpid treacherous swimmer <br />With endless leaps, disowning the sickness <br />Hamlet! It’s as if I began to build in the ocean depths <br />A thousand tombs: to vanish still virgin there. <br /> <br />Mirthful gold of a cymbal beaten with fists, <br />The sun all at once strikes the pure nakedness <br />That breathed itself out of my coolness of nacre, <br /> <br />Rancid night of the skin, when you swept over me, <br />Not knowing, ungrateful one, that it was, this make-up, <br />My whole anointing, drowned in ice-water perfidy.<br /><br />Stéphane Mallarmé<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-clown-chastised/
