“The trace and perfume of you is what possesses me. I am dispossessed of myself, and of the development of myself, and everything that is not the possession of myself by you. You are the heavens’ grasp upon my shapeless clay. All is divine to me at last for all resembles you, and beyond my reason and my heart I know what is a sacred place, as far as I am concerned I know what consecrates it. I am the true idolater for whom the temples have proliferated like diseases. No single spot, henceforth, that shall not be a place of worship for me, an altar.”
—Louis Aragon, from Paris Peasant [tr. Simon Watson Taylor]
“Sea, do you really love the putrescent corpses of your drowned victims? do you love the softness of their facile limbs? do you love their abjuring love from the unfathomed deep? their incredible purity and their floating hair? Then let my ocean love me. Pass across, pass across my palms, water like tears, boundless woman, by whom I am entirely bathed. Pass across my sky, my silence, my veils. Let my birds lose themselves in your eyes. Kill, kill: here are my forests, my heart, my cavalcades. My deserts. My mythologies. My calamities. And in this zodiac where I perpetuate myself, havoc at last, lovely monster, a venison of clarities.”
—Louis Aragon, from Paris Peasant [tr. Simon Watson Taylor]
