A Day with Rimbaud in the Médiathèque
His books ripen on the shelves,
Fruit boasting their own sorts of juices,
Despite, to the touch, being dry paper...
I seem to drink in Rimbaud,
The volumes of him, slotted between wooden partitions.
Forget South Kensington’s drab bustle, forget even ourselves-
I loll in a glittering orchard now,
Planted by Rimbaud, that nervous- often nasty- teenager,
Ambiguous, ambivalent, in everything,
From his sexuality to his verse,
And I ask him to grow in me,
To do all that his at times serene, at times surreal, alexandrines can allow.
What was he? His mother’s monster she regretted?
Verlaine’s perpetually uneasy catamite?
A pin- up boy for the spoilt sham revolutionaries of ‘68
(Students must have panted over Rimbaud’s truth- crammed indecency,
(In the hope of emulating it)?
I consider him, and feel, regarding him, indebted-
In the Mediatheque, its dullness, its quiet,
Where he is the core of the Forbidden Fruit,
Its very seeds, bursting out,
Sprouting not at all conveniently,
Smashing into my eyes
With all the expensive outrage of a manic riot.
What is he? A serpent alone?
But every one of us is a matter of slime, fangs and venom;
He is a mirror to our vices-
He is sin as a reflection of us.
It is not Eden, this Earth of ours-
I continue to laze, with a book of his, on my own,
Or, rather, with him, and I, prone to gnawing tension, muse-
On the eternal evil that binds each to each,
On re-entering the Garden with him,
A foul- mouthed angel, rough and beatific...
Note, there is a still quaintness in him
We tend to prefer to forget, to, indeed, lose.
Rimbaud can seem gentle, even well- behaved,
Nattering about seventeen year old types with their short- lived happiness,
About hungry kids looking in at the baker’s,
About lovers meandering through the grass (poets- always in need of clichés!)...
Was it the shifty Verlaine
Who made him so mercifully depraved?
The English translations don’t get him-
They are worse than plastic oranges,
Without texture or flavour,
They don’t approach his gleeful arrogance in the slightest.
Gulp him down in French,
Savour his hard wickedness, exerted by him at a whim.
French school kids must become bored-
Being taught about him by whining grey teachers,
As sapless as death,
And, at their desks, scribbling out essays on him to be marked.
Subjecting Rimbaud to the constraints of a text book
Is cruel to the memory of this, mayhem’s unblinking lord.
Swallow him down, in the Mediatheque, in French,
And resolve to go down Exhibition Road nearby, to protest,
To shriek out against Money and Order,
Then, exhausted after an appropriate display of happy left- wing madness,
Return with demure insouciance to the Mediatheque,
Pick up ‘Une Saison En Enfer’, and enjoy its sulphuric stench...
And recall, how Rimbaud, growing older, changed (because we are all tainted, devoured, by change).
He stopped the unapologetic fragrance of his poetry,
And became- a stinking pirate, I suppose,
A gun- runner and slave- trader in ‘Christian’ Ethiopia,
With its court eunuchs and its everyday serfs.
How vicious, how disgusting, how strange,
For fate to convert us into what we should not be!
It is nearly seven o’ clock, it is a July evening, in the Mediatheque;
The place must close.
I put Rimbaud back on his shelf,
Leave the Orchard, quit the Garden,
And, outside, proceed through London’s well- rehearsed- parched- banality.
ZEKRIA IBRAHIMI (AGED 58)