Possession, Poem by Charles Cros

Since my mouth has met
Her mouth, I must be silent. Truce
To hollow words. I will show
Nothing that might betray my dream.

I must say nothing
Of the scent of her hair,
Of her airy smile,
Of the bravado of her bearing,

Nothing of her eyes with troubling glances,
Persuasive, cabalistic,
Nothing of her shoulders, her white arms
With aromatic effluvia.

Besides, I no longer know how to make
Such a learned analysis,
Possessed by better dreams
Where my reason is paralyzed.

And I feel as if carried away,
A wreck at the mercy of the waves,
By the vertigo into which she threw me
With her lukewarm lips, her vacant eyes.

People will wonder whence comes
The all-powerful influence that oppresses me,
But no one will know anything of it
But I alone… and the Enchantress.

Charles Cros

Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.

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