The tide is in my heart
Rising up like a sign
I am dying for my little sister
For my child and my swan
A boat—it depends on how
You moor it in the nick of time
It weeps from my firmament
Light-years, and I leave some behind
I am the Jersey ghost
The one who comes on show-off nights
To blow a kiss of mist at you
And gather you up in his rhymes
Like the July trammel net
Where the lone wolf gleamed
The one I saw shining
On the fingers of the earth’s sand

Remember that dog of the sea
We released on its own recognizance
And which howls in the wasteland
Of necropolis seaweed
I am sure life is there
With its flannel lungs
When the grey cold calls to us
Weeping for those times
I remember the evenings there
And the sprints won on the foam
That spittle of low-slung horses
Skimming the rocks that burn away
Oh, angel of lost pleasures
Oh, murmurs of another habit
My desires from then on are nothing
But the sorrow of my solitude

And the devil of conquered evenings
With his pallor of rescue
And the shark of paradises
Amidst the moss-dampened air
Come back, green girl of the fjords
Come back, violin of violin-songs
Horns blare in the harbor
For the return of comrades
Oh, rare scent of the salt marshes
In the peppery sting of chapped skin
When I went, tracing the geometry
Of my soul in the hollow of your wound
In the disarray of your backside
Sticky in sheets of fine dawn-light
I saw one more stained-glass window
And you, green girl—my melancholy

The seashells appearing
Beneath the broken, liquid spotlights
Clack their castanets so much
You’d think it was Spain livid
Gods of granite, have pity
On their calling to be adornment
When the knife comes to intrude
Upon their castanet-like features
And I saw what one senses
When one senses that fleeting glimpse
Between the blood’s Venetian blinds
And the globules trace out
A blue mathematics
In this sea that is never still
From which rises up, little by little,
This memory of the stars

This murmur coming from there
Beneath the friendly arch where I am blinded
These hands making a fuss over me
These ruminating hands that low
This murmur follows me for a long time
Like a beggar under a curse
Like the shadow wasting its time
Sketching out my theorem
And beneath my russet makeup
It comes beating like a door
This murmur walking upright
In the street, amidst dead music
It is over, the sea, it is over
On the beach, the sand bleats
Like sheep of infinity
When the sea, the shepherdess, calls me » (Léo Ferré)