b. 5/19/1890, Lisboa
suicide, 4/26/1916, Paris


Manicure

Feeling my fingernails being polished,
A sudden, inexplicable feeling of tenderness,
I fold everything into Me, piously.
Yet here I am alone in a Café
This morning, as usual, me and my tawny yawns.
Behind me tables, only tables — hard
And boorish, foursquare in uncultured
Gaucherie; quadrangular, free-thinking...
Outside, a sunny may day —
A brutish, provincial, democratic day
That my delicate, refined, elegant, citified eyes
Are unable to tolerate — struggling, they barely
Withstand the nausea. My whole sensibility
Is offended by days like this, but they must
Have their singer among the friends with whom I stroll at times —
Those natural brunettes with big mustaches
Who write, join political parties,
Attend republican congresses,
Run around with women, like red wine,
Pearmains, fried sardines...

And with this feeling of polishing my fingernails,
Painting them with parisian lacquer,
I become more and more moved to compassion
Till I cry out for Me...
A thousand colors in the Air, a thousand throbbing vibrations,
Distant misty planes
Drop down sinuously, shifting streaks, flexing discs
Come tenuously, drawing up in me
All the tenderness I could have lived,
All the grandeur I could have sensed,
All the mise-en-scene I ever was...
This is like the weak obsession
Of a smile reflected in empty mirrors
Focusing on me, bit by bit...
Delicate winding flexures...
Fine crystalline quiver...
Unattainable slippage...
Swift atmospheric spark...

And all these things driving through space
To me, numberless intersections
Of multiple, free, lubricious planes.

There, in a huge, undulating, phantasmal
Mirror spouting all down through my past,
Is my demolished present,
My future already dust...

.......................................................................................................................................

Putting aside my files,
My scissors, my godets of varnish,
The polishers of my sensations —
I let loose my eyes — to be maddened by Air!
Oh! if only I could exhaust every inlay!
If only I could hammer away at this beauty — unsupported, in the end! —

To sing all that revolves, molds, saturates,
Strews and expands in subtilized,
Streaming vibrations: — ever toward infinity!...
Calottes hanging under ruined ogives,
Solid triangles in broken naves!
Spirals trailing behind a vertical flight!
Wonderful spheres in a tennis ball’s wake!
How blondely aquiver, the player’s laughing mouth...
Scarlet fanning garlands when a half-naked
Russian ballerina flutters painted Salome hands
On a great stage of Gold!
— How lacy, other ballets!
Ah! these precipial inflections, strident, blinding,
These brutal vertices, divergent, grinding,
Apache daggers pierce
High chill dawns...

And in stations and embarcaderos,
The big, piled crates,
The baggage, the bundles — pell-mell...
I toss everything into the Air,
Fashioned for it, culled for it
In multiple interstices
Wherever I feel my Soul wander!...

— O futurist beauty of commodities!
— O brown paper wrappers,
How I’d love to wear you like a toga!
— Wooden crates,
How I yearn to sink my teeth into you!
And the spikes, the cords, the hoops... —
But most of all, in my eyes emboldened by beauty,
The dancing, sparkling inscriptions
On every article of drayage —
Black, red, blue or green —
Shouts of the present, of Commerce & Industry
In cosmopolitan transit:


    


Avidly tracking new atmospheric Beauty,
My gaze slithers constantly
In frenzied absorption.
What sortilege! Everything discharges
Into a great insidious fluid
Grotesquely aswirl — swift,
Imponderable, elegantly frivolous light...
— Look at the tables... Eia! Eia!
Cabriolets fly straight up into the Air
In an instantaneous series of quads and spaces —
But already, farther off, in distant, removed lozenges...
And the ranks plunge indistinguishably,
And mixing with the tables, bellowing insinuations
Of pews covered with crimson velvet
Which course caroming throughout the café...
And, higher still, in oblique planes,
Airy symbolisms of tenuous heraldry
Dazzle chessmen at the feet of the chairs
Which, startled from their horizontal sleep,
Also arise in a sarabande...

My eyes annointed with Novelty,
Yes! — my futurist, my cubist, my intersectionist eyes
Will not stop quivering and lapping up all the sparkling,
Spectral beauty, transferred, succedaneous,
All that Beauty-without-Support,
Disconjunct, emerged, variable
Always and free — in continuous mutation,
Unfathomable divagations...

— How much for my banal porcelain teacup?

Ah, exhaled in amphoric Greek curves,
Rising in a spiral, ciliate vortex,
Convex edge shooting gold...


    

                [It’s in the air that everything undulates! It’s there that everything exists!]


Now, from the long polished glass falling to the street,
Come theories of hyaline vertices
Pulsing crystallizations, misty, diffuse,
Like sunbolts they pierce the broad pane,
Dancing in the space they tint with fantasy,
knots, italics, arrows, wings, — in multicolor dust —.

        APOTHEOSIS

...............................................................................................................................

A timbrel crashes nearby:
Sonorous smatterings!
Just what the landscape needed...
Acoustic waves subtilize it the more:
Here they come! here they come! They run agile,
They slip away gracefully, slender does of the Soul...
A voice asks for a number on the telephone:
North — 2, 0, 5, 7...
And through the Air thrust algorithmic moldures:

        ASSUMPTION OF NUMERIC BEAUTY!

    

Far away, a waiter drops a tray!
No end to this marvel!
A new turbulence of silver-plated waves
Widens in a rutile rustle of circular echoes,
Like cold water splashing and refreshing the environs...

— My eyes exhaust themselves in Beauty!

Ineffable shadowy daydream —
I compress my eyelids... I squint...

..............................................................................................................................

...And begin to recall jade rings
On certain hands I once possessed —
And behold, by sorcery, now entwining in the air...
They remind me of kisses — and carmine
marquetries arise...

Sequined helices diverge...
Crests open, rend edges...
Small golden timbres entwine...
Spirals shoot, crosses interlock,
Stars that shatter, plumes aswarm...

Aching to glide my eyes into such riches,
I shut them tenaciously...
In vain! There’s no defense:
Through darkness:
Planes, intervals, ruptures, vaults, declivities...

— O theatrical magic of the atmosphere,
— O contemporary magic — only we,
We of today, can augment you with a roar!

..............................................................................................................................

Eia! Eia!
Vibrationary turmoil sails ahead
Like never before to overflow in iridescent rhythms!
I feel myself translated through the air. Twining skeins!
Eia! Eia! Eia!

(How everything seems so different
When irrealized in gas:
Free-thinking, fluidic
Diluted tables;
They’re all catholic like me, all monarchists like me!)

...........................................................................................................................
...........................................................................................................................

Serene.
A stranger sits in front of me
And unfolds the Matin.
My eyes, now momentarily tranquilized,
Catch sight of distant characters,
And all the new typographical sensibility
Starts quivering before me.

Eh-lá! Bold Norman of sensational headlines!
Finely-calibrated italcs of the daily columns!
12-point Roman, foursquare, bourgeois, comfortable,
Gothics, cursives, uncials, britannics, capitals!
Miniscule type of tiny classifieds!
My Elsevier, with its pederastic curves,
And the typographical ornaments, vignettes,
Thick black borders,
Punctuation’s frivolous “puzzle”,
Asterisks — and quotation marks... accents...
Eh-lá! Eh-lá! Eh-lá!


    


— All the ancient and modern abecedaries,
Greek, Gothic,
Slavic, Arabic, Latin —,
Eia-hô! Eia-hô! Eia-hô!

(Hip! Hip-lá! new onomatopoeic sympathy,
Gushing from pure alphabetic beauty:
Uu-um... kess-kress... vliiim... tlin... blong... flong... flak...
Pâ-am-pam! Pam... pam... pum... pum... Hurrah!)

The stranger turns the page;
He reads the latest flashes;
Light as the page
In a swirl of letters,
The whole world rests in his hands!

— Hurrah for you, typographic industry!
— Hurrah for you, newspaper publishers!


    


Finally, he unfolds the advertising page...

O Advertising’s zebra-striped emotivity,
O futurist aesthetic — up-to-dateness of trademarks,
Firms, signboards!...


    


Elegant artlessness of firms, LTD.

...................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................

All this, all this, all this and more! Again I gaze into the Air —
All Beauty undulates there as well:
Numbers and letters, firm,
High reliefs, ornamentation!... —
Words in liberty, sound unbound,


    


Before I get up, a Parisian
Marvel comes to mind — zinc
Counters in bars... who knows why...

— Un vermouth-cassis... Un Pernod à l’eau...
Un amer-citron... Une grenadine...

...................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................

I stand...
And I fall flat!
Deep down and even more excessively, mirrors reflect
Everything ashimmer in the air,
With an even subtler beauty shining through...
— O dream unfettered, O errant moonlight,
I’ll never be able to sing in verse,
As I’ve yearned till I’ve come molten Gold,
All that Pure,
That unattainable Beauty!
I roll down myself like a flight of stairs...
I neglect my hands,
I forget all about lacquering my nails...
And, gnashing my teeth, with distant eyes,
Hatless, like a man possessed,
I make my stand!

I run down the street, leaping and shouting.

— Hilá! Hilá! Hilá-hô! Eh! Eh!

Tum... tum... tum... tum tum tum tum...




Lisboa, May 1915


•—•—•—•—•

• First posted by Berkeley Neo-Baroque Gang of One, 4.15.2006


• Under continual revision and augmentation


• Reproduction rights granted upon request