Another Fan

By Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Peter Manson.

Of Mademoiselle Mallarmé

Dreamer, that I might plunge
into pure unguided delight,
learn, by a subtfle lie,
how to guard my wing in your hand.

A twilight coolness
comes your way with each beat
whose captive stroke delicately
pushes back the horizon.

Vertigo! see space
shivering like a great kiss
that, mad to have been born for no-one,
can neither break free nor calm down.

Do you feel the untamed paradise
slip like a buried laugh
from the corner of your mouth
to the base of the unanimous fold?

The sceptre of rose-coloured shores
stagnant on golden evenings, this is it,
this white closed flight you pose against
the fire of a bracelet.

Elsewhere: The Poems in Verse (2012), Peter Manson’s translation of the Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé.
Still farther: Lady Windermere’s Fan, ed. N. Scargill (Pride Press, 2012)

From “Love’s Work”

By Gillian Rose.

Subsequently, I found myself in a routinely tedious faculty meeting, in which, as usual, I carried no presence whatsoever. As drivers insist that the blaring radio aids their concentration on the road, so I always found that a volume open on my lap enabled me to pay the small amount of attention needed to navigate these shallows. When asked with withering detection by the impassive secretary whether the book I was blatantly perusing was good, I nonchalantly replied, “I only read good books.” I responded similarly to her policing my failure to send a note of apology for a meeting that I actually managed to miss, “But I’m not sorry.” On this particular occasion, I was aware of an intense aura emanating from someone whom I had never seen before, an intense, sexual aura, aimed precisely and accurately at my vacant being. “A man,” I wondered, “could there be a man in this meeting?” He looked weather-beaten, his flat, lined faced suffused with a self-consciously alert intelligence and a knowledge of sensual power. I had no idea who he was, and did not pursue the matter.