jewels

The darling girl was nude, and, knowing well my heart,
She'd kept on nothing but her plangent jewelry,
Which rich adornments let her play the victor's part
As Moorish slave girls will on days of revelry.

Her dancing cast about a bright and brittle sound;
A world all glittering with metals and with stones
Held me in frenzied ecstasy; I was spellbound
By glory-dappled things and flashes mixed with tones.

She stretched herself full length to give herself to me,
And from the height of her divan she smiled delight
Upon my love as deep and gentle as the sea,
Rising to her as waves ascend a cliff's smooth height.

A placid tiger, she had fixed her eye on me;
In vague and dreamy ways she posed herself to please,
Such innocence combined with such lubricity
Somehow refreshed her charming metamorphoses.

Her slender arms, her legs, her pelvis and her thighs,
Polished as smooth as oil, and curved in swan-like lines,
Displayed themselves to my serene, discerning eyes;
Her belly and her breasts, those clusters on my vines,

Thrust forward, mocking as the evil Angels mock,
To wreck my soul's repose within its quiet place,
And disarticulate it from the crystal rock
Where, calm and solitary, it had found a space.

I thought I saw combining in a new design
Antiope's slim haunch with shoulders of a youth,
So well her waist deployed into her hips' soft line.
The rouge on her face was spread superbly smooth

-And when the failing lamp resigned itself to die,
Only the hearthfire cast a light throughout the chamber;
Each time the glowing coals exhaled a blazing sigh,
It seems to inundate with blood that skin of amber.


-Baudelaire