XLVIII - The Flask - Transversion from Baudelaire's Crown of Pain ( Fleurs du Mal)

XLVIII. - The Flask

There are strong perfumes for which all matter

Is porous. You’d think they might penetrate the glass.

While opening some oriental casket

Whose lock grimaces and balks before crying out,

Or, in a deserted house in some old armoire  

Full of the acrid odour of time, blackened with soot,

Where you might find an old flask

In which pulses the soul of one still alive.

A thousand thoughts sleep, funerary crystals,

Gently trembling in the leaden darkness

Spreading their wings finding their essence,

Azure tinted, crystalized rose, burnished tears.

And so the memory stirs gathering voltage

From the troubled air; the eyes close; vertigo

Seizes the vanquished soul and pushes with both hands

Towards the obscure abyss of human miasms.

There terraced on the edge of a secular gulf

Where foul smelling Lazarus rips his shroud,

Mute in his awakening like the spectral corpse

Of a rancid love, charming and sepulchral

.

Like so, when I too become lost to memory

Among men, just like in the corner of some sinister

 Old armoire where someone last left me,

Like some decrepit, dirty, abject, dusty old vicious flask.

I will be your coffin, amiable pestilence.

A testament to your force and violence.  

Dear poison prepared by the angels, like liquor

Which gnawed at both the life and death of my heart.