Fog and rain (Brumes et pluies)

Autumn, winter, and spring go by like boats.
I love these sleepy days, living undersea
as I do, my heart and brain adrift in vapors,
in linoleum fumes of rooms dimly entombed.

Across this bare plain play freezing winds,
gyring and debris-filled vortices end to end nightly.
I think of nothing better to do than listen
to crows open their wings wide and flap them like sheets.

Nothing is more soothing, in this funereal mood,
with thoughts so dead they begin to form floes
that clog the bleak months—the queens of these latitudes—

than the inspired sense of permanent shadow
in which moonlessly and side by side
we sleep in the first bed we come to.


(after Baudelaire)