It may not be unreal, and it won’t have,
like the other one, a Thames for company,
but its river, its estuary as wide as
the sky, never stops being beautiful
Its clarity is at times so much more poignant
than the other whose skin leans against
the banks
of other rivers (the one that inspired the English poet
with its nymphs, or bequeathed the blond
women warriors to the German musician)
In these parts, this river has been called everything
from graceful to conjuror of such
ardent desire.
And the city which, in an ignorant moment of protean
explosion, inherited its waters,
its legends, its caravels,
has also inherited other things:
wishes to fly a thousand rhymes,
for people so diverse and for such immense nights,
for a moon so large and so out
from its gentle path
Not even Jerusalem blinded by a man
who, in the rip of the century,
spoke of it, as he spoke of London, Vienna,
Alexandria or others,
ah, sweet, run now, till I end my song
till I end my song, my song, my
song
Spenser’s line would fit here
now, original,
in a city not unreal,
but of so much blue, so laced
at its windows, and re-visited
by such sorrow,
that even she of the hyacinths, would
recognise herself: You,
hipocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère
And the rest: a song
unfinished -