Our Secret Loves

I will take you against my soul, if you want,
Since our diverse beauty coincides
Since I found you, corporeal and lucid
The nymph that troubled the waters of my past

❋

I want you! I want you! And to be nothing but a woman
On the forbidden edge of your happiness.
Despite the night of joy and the closed doors
I am not alone with you
Gomorrah burns around us
I will attack you! I will cripple you! The fine short gleam of a blade!

❋

I am always being transformed and always am the same
And throw the strength of my voice into the wind
And press my zesty, sensual chest
So as to maintain under the exertion of ten fingers
All the passions of my eternal soul.
If, frantically, my desire exceeds you,
It is that, breaking the seal of our humanity,
My being is struggling under the god who's holding it

❋

Your soul of a receding water and my soul of thirst
Will they join?
At the heart of our carnal feasts
Where I can't take you and drink into a kiss...

❋

Leaning on you I found your soul
Like the splendor of gold, and porphyry and iron
Of a sunken city intact under the sea

❋

My eyes, who saw the darkened flame of my soul,
Will lower your troubled eyes like water
I shall burn your laughter and your eyes
You shall feel on you the force of my grasp
Through the sweetness of ten golden nails
And, with all my love and mastery that heals,
I will possess you! I will possess you!

❋

One touch is enough to shatter my defences
One touch of my lover
Her kiss upon me like a radiant blade
But some nights when we sleep together
I'm nothing but a prey
Who's struggling against her laughing, crying and trembling
and will die of joy, will die of joy!
Who's ever held out this profound string
Inside my soul of pride so dark and carnal?

❋

Come back in the morning, thin, with empty waist
And with the feverish eyes of beasts in love
Ah! Finally in those arms full of vice and dream
With rage, evisceration, murder,
Like a dark Messaline at the end of lovers
Screaming under the sword possessed by pleasure!

❋

I couldn't satisfy my insatiable soul
With all of life.
I couldn't satisfy my unappeased body
With every kiss.
Desire eternal moaning in my being
Has not yet found her master.
And nothing will ever silence in my soul and in my body
The voice that's crying: Again ! ... Again !...

❋

If you come, I'll seize your lips right at the door,
We will walk into the shadow and the cushions without talk
I will throw you there, at the duration of a death,
I shall desire you, to tears, to tears!

❋

I overthrow you and I seize your mouth,
Open calyx, red possession
It's a soft and wet depth
Sweet at death, where I lose myself and slip
It's my intimate abyss, closed and slick
Where my desire is sinking to the heart...
May I see your head finally fall
Defeated, at the end of sensuality...

❋

I will die of its depth
And can't be hurt like prey
Under the domineering kiss
Across your deathbed of intoxication
With all the sobbing on the heart!

❋

And I will drink your strange fraternal laughter
Like a sip of troubled carnal taste
Swallowing the dangerous wine of your ferocious soul...

❋

You, of a dreamy and a reckless vice...
I will see the colour of the abyss of your soul
I will search until the bottom, if I may,
And I will tilt considerate of all my fear of a woman
Upon the obscure daze that's dripping from a well..

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(The above is merely excerpts I translated from a poems collection titled "Nos Secrètes Amours", written around 1903 by Lucie Delarue. It was inspired by her fiery affair with Natalie Clifford Barney.)