Alcools

In the streets of Paris and along the roads of Europe, a man traverses the dawning century with his alcohols of words and his intoxications of images. He walks by night beneath the Pont Mirabeau, where the Seine flows alongside the memories of lost loves; he wanders through neighborhoods where omnibuses roar and posters sing the new poetry. Zone opens on the weariness of an ancient world and the Eiffel Tower shepherding its flock of bridges—Christianity alone remains as new as the hangars of Port-Aviation, and the poet takes to the skies with the aviator Christ, holding the world altitude record, whilst mythical and real birds alike converge upon this modern ascension.

The unloved one sings his romance from London to the steppes of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, dragging the seven swords of melancholy thrust into his heart. Annie Playden has fled to America, Marie Laurencin draws away, and among the venomous autumn crocuses, life slowly poisons itself for purplish eyes. The Rhénanes unfurl their Germanic legends—the golden-haired Lorelei casts herself from the rock, Schinderhannes and his gang drink May wine before setting out to murder, the synagogues ring with Hebraic chants while the vineyards redden on the hillsides.

In the house of the dead in Munich, the deceased step out of their glass cases and dance a macabre, joyous round with the living—for there is nothing so elevating as having loved a dead man or woman. The hermit descends from his Thebaid toward the cities, the Christian thief steals the fruits of the mythological garden, the mountebanks slip away along the gardens with their round weights and gilded drums. The traveler knocks on doors weeping, crosses through towns whirling like madwomen, and listens to the bearded shadows glide across the bright mountain.

At La Santé, the poet paces in circles like a bear in his pit; the hours pass, slow as a funeral. The betrothals mingle the evocation of the latest arrivals in the little lemon grove with the stars that all words yet to be spoken have become. The brazier consumes the skulls of the past, the hands of believers cast the multiple and innumerable poet into it, and from this adorable fire rise the immense flames of a renewed life.

Vendémiaire concludes this odyssey with a universal thirst—Paris drinks the blood of Europe, and all the cities of France and the world come flowing into its deep throat. The Sicilian vines send forth their clusters of the dead, Rome offers the wine of the cross, the Moselle and the Rhine join their liquid prayers. On the Quai d'Auteuil, the poet becomes the gullet of Paris and drinks the entire universe concentrated within this pure wine, knowing at last the flavor of the universe in this September night where the stars are dying and the day is barely born.