That I want thee, only thee---let my heart repeat without end.
All desires that distract me, day and night,
are false and empty to the core.

As the night keeps hidden in its gloom the petition for light,
even thus in the depth of my unconsciousness rings the cry
---`I want thee, only thee'.

As the storm still seeks its end in peace
when it strikes against peace with all its might,
even thus my rebellion strikes against thy love
and still its cry is
---`I want thee, only thee'.

Only serpents let their skin be fallen
And a soul -- all grown up and old.
We, alas, change an eternal soul,
Leaving body in eternal hold.

Oh, remembrance, power, she-giant,
You direct a horse-life with a bridle,
You will tell me all these men about,
Who had had my body before I'd.

The first one was ugly, thin and tragic,
Loving darkness of the garden lane,
Falling Leaf, the child of gloomy magic,
Whose one word could fully stop the rain.

Second one -- he liked the wind from South,

No butterfly whose frugal fare
Is breath of heliotrope and clove,
And other trifles light as air,
Could live on less than doth my love.

That childlike smile that comes and goes
About your gracious lips and eyes,
Hath all the sweetness of the rose,
Which feeds the freckled butterflies.

I feed my love on smiles, and yet
Sometimes I ask, with tears of woe,
How had it been if we had met,
If you had met me long ago,

Before the fast, defacing years
Had made all ill that once was well?

Out in the grey cheerless chill of the morning light,
Out on the track where the night shades still lurk,
ere the first gleam of the sungod's returning light
Round come the racehorses early at work.
Reefing and pulling and racing so readily,
Close sit the jockey-boys holding them hard,
"Steady the stallion there -- canter him steadily,
Don't let him gallop so much as a yard."

Fiercely he fights while the others run wide of him,
Reefs at the bit that would hold him in thrall,
Plunges and bucks till the boy that's astride of him

We brought him in from between the lines: we'd better have let him lie;
For what's the use of risking one's skin for a tyke that's going to die?
What's the use of tearing him loose under a gruelling fire,
When he's shot in the head, and worse than dead, and all messed up on the wire?
However, I say, we brought him in. Diable! The mud was bad;
The trench was crooked and greasy and high, and oh, what a time we had!
And often we slipped, and often we tripped, but never he made a moan;

I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Céline at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky...
or Hamsun...
ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes,
ordinary men with hair on their heads
sitting there typing words
while having difficulties with life
while being puzzled almost to madness.

Dostoevsky gets up
he leaves the machine to piss,
comes back
drinks a glass of milk and thinks about
the casino and
the roulette wheel.

Céline stops, gets up, walks to the
window, looks out, thinks, my last patient

The day will dawn when one of us shall hearken
In vain to hear a voice that has grown dumb.
And morns will fade, noons pale, and shadows darken,
While sad eyes watch for feet that never come.
One of us two must sometime face existence
Alone with the memories that but sharpen pain.
And these sweet days shall shine back in the distance,
Like dreams of summer dawns, in nights of rain.
One of us two, with tortured heart half broken,
Shall read long-treasured letters through salt tears,
Shall kiss with anguished lips each cherished token,

One of twain, twin-born with flowers that waken,
Now hath passed from sense of sun and rain:
Wind from off the flower-crowned branch hath shaken
One of twain.

One twin flower must pass, and one remain:
One, the word said soothly, shall be taken,
And another left: can death refrain?

Two years since was love's light song mistaken,
Blessing then both blossoms, half in vain?
Night outspeeding light hath overtaken
One of twain.


Night and light? O thou of heart unwary,
Love, what knowest thou here at all aright,

We were out on the hills that night
To watch our sheep;
Drowsily by the fire we lay
Where the waning flame did flicker and leap,
And some were weary and half asleep,
And some talked low of their flocks and the fright
Of a lion that day.

But I had drawn from the others apart;
I was only a lad,
And the night's great silence so filled my heart
That I dared not talk and I dared not jest;
The moon had gone down behind the hill
And even the wind of the desert was still;
As the touch of death the air was cold,

No smoke without you, my fire.
After you left,
your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray
and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey
I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal
of so much love. One cigarette
in the non-smoker's tray.
As the last spire
trembles up, a sudden draught
blows it winding into my face.
Is it smell, is it taste?
You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.
Out with the light.
Let the smoke lie back in the dark.
Till I hear the very ash
sigh down among the flowers of brass