Palace

Poem by Guillaume Apollinaire Collection AlcoolsThemes Art, Dreams, WealthPeriod 20th century

Toward Rosemonde’s palace at the depth of Dream
My dreamy thoughts go barefoot to the evening party
The palace, the king’s gift, rises like a naked king
From the whipped flesh of the roses in the rose garden

One sees coming at the garden’s end my thoughts
That smile at the concert played by the frogs
They long for the cypresses, great distaffs
And the sun, mirror of roses, has shattered

The bloody stigma of hands against the panes
What badly wounded bow of sunset pierced it
The resin that makes bitter the wine of Cyprus
My mouth at the agape of white lamb tasted it

On the pointed knees of the adulterous monarch
On the maypole of his age and on his thirty-one
Madame Rosemonde rolls with mystery
Her little eyes all round like the eyes of Huns

Lady of my thoughts with the fine pearl arse
Whose neither pearl nor arse equals the orient
Whom then do you await
Dreamy thoughts marching at the Orient
My most beautiful neighbors

Knock knock Come in the antechamber daylight fades
The night light in the shadow is a jewel of cooked gold
Hang your heads on the coat racks by the braids
The almost nocturnal sky has glimmers of needles

We entered the dining room our nostrils
Sniffed an odor of grease and of grime
We had twenty soups three of them urine-colored
And the king took two poached eggs in broth
Then the scullions brought the meats
Roasts of dead thoughts in my brain
My beautiful stillborn dreams in well-bloody slices
And my gamey memories in meatballs

Now these thoughts dead for millennia
Had the bland taste of great frozen mammoths
The bones or dream-hollows came from the ossuaries
In danse macabre in the folds of my cerebellum

And all these dishes cried incomparable things
But name of God!
A hungry belly has no ears
And the guests chewed away for all they were worth

Ah! name of God! what did those ribs cry out
Those great pâtés those marrow bones and mirotons
Tongues of fire where are they my Pentecosts
For my thoughts of all countries of all times

Guillaume Apollinaire

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