Classic Poem

My lovers do not belong to the two rich classes:
They are the suburban and rural workmen.
Their fifteen and twenty years, unrestrained, and prodigious
With their brutal force and gross ways.

I sense them in their work clothes, overalls and shirts:
They do not smell of perfume, but blossom with health
Pure and simple; their heavy walk is nimble
For all that with youthful and grave elasticity.

Their frank and sly eyes crackle with cordial
Malice, and naively deceitful words
Flow — not without a gay oath to spice them —
From their mouths fresh with solid kisses;

Their vigorous ways and joyous manners
Gladden the night, and my soul, and my body
Under the lamp and at dawn, their joyous flesh,
Resuscitates my tired desire never conquered.

Body, soul, hands, all my being pell-mell
Memory, feet, heart, spine and ear and nose,
And the belly all cry out in a mad chorus,
Mingling in a frenzied dance amidst the frantic clamour.

A mad dance and a mad refrain, mad and stupid,
And rather divine than infernal, more infernal
Than divine, to engulf me, and I swim, and I fly
In their sweat and in their breath and at these antics.

My two Charlots: One a young tiger with the eyes of a cat,
Out of a choirboy to a soldier grown;
The other, a proud fellow, handsomely brazen, unruffled,
That my dizzy being towards him melts.

Odilon, an urchin, but developed like a man,
His feet love mine enamoured of his toes;
Or better still, but not better than the rest of him,
His adorable torso, but his feet are without comparison!

Lovers, fresh satin, delicate phalanxes
Above the souls, above the ankles, and on
The veiny arches: and those exotic kisses
So sweet, of four feet having but a single soul!

Antoine, again proverbial as to his sins
He, my triumphant king and supreme God,
Pierces my eyes with his blue pupils,
And my heart with his awesome passion.

Paul, a blonde athlete of superb shoulders,
White chest with hard buttons as sweet as
A good kiss: François, supple as a slender stem,
Legs of a dance, and as beautiful as his love.

Auguste, who becomes more masculine from day to day
(He was very pretty when he first came among us);
Jules, a little whorish with his pale beauty;
Henri, left me, the coward, to go with the others:

And all of you, in line or in mingled group,
Or singly: vision so clear of days that have gone,
Passions of the present, future that grows and unites
Cherished ones without number and never enough!