CARRION

Carrion
by CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867)

Darling, do you recall that thing we found
("A lovely summer day!" you said)
That noisome carcass where the path swung round
A sprawling pebble-covered bed.

Its legs raised like a whore's in lubric play,
It burned, oozing rank fetors there,
Shameless and nonchalant, it offered day
Its belly. Poisons filled the air.

The sun beat down on this putrescent mold
As if to fry it to a turn,
To give great Nature back one hundredfold
All she had gathered in her urn.

The skies watched that proud carcass, lax or taut,
Bloom like a flowery mass.
So pungent was the stench, my love, you thought
To swoon away upon the grass.

Horseflies buzzed loud over this putrid belly,
Whence sallied column and battalion
Of stable maggots, flowing like a mucose jelly,
Over this live tatterdemalion.

Waves seemed to rise and fall over this mass,
Spurting with crepitation,
As though this corpse, filled with breaths of gas,
Lived by multiplication.

This world uttered a curious melody,
Like waters, wind, or grains of wheat
That winnowers keep stirring rhythmically
In the broad baskets at their feet.

The forms, fading into a dream, grew fainter;
Here was a sketch of misty tone
On a forgotten canvas which the painter
Completes from memory alone.

Hiding behind the rocks, an anxious bitch
Stood, watching us with angry eye,
Poised to regain the olid morsel which,
Hearing us come, she had laid by.

- Yet shall you be like this ordurous blight,
You, too, shall rot in just such fashion,
Star of my eyes, sun of my soul's delight,
Aye, you, my angel and my passion.

Such you, O queen of graces, in the hours,
When the last sacrament is said,
That bear you under rich sods and Iush flower
To molder with the moldering dead.

Then, O my beauty! Tell such worms as will
Kiss you in ultimate coition
That I have kept the form and essence of
My love in its decomposition.

- Jacques LeClercq, Flowers of Evil.