Plus près des choses

Closer to Things

Rene Salome

SIXTH CAHIER, CAHIER FOR THE FIRST OF JANUARY, OF THE TENTH SERIES

IN MEMORIAM — to the memory of our friend Eddy Marix, 31 August 1908

---

Leafy island, girdled with porphyry and seaweed, Trailing on the laughing, wandering wave Your long Oceanid hair and the touch Of your long harping fingers that evoke the song Of the blue maidens hidden beneath the sea-plants;

Leafy island where the nostrils quicken With the resinous balms of cedars and pines, And in the same breath of air, in the healthy gust Of salt waters opening on all sides, You have told us, from the height of your red walls, Your first dream, and you are reborn in a past Divine, balanced on the liquid enamels, Homeland of the vegetal Fauns and of the Dryads.

Now, chubby, red-haired, half-goats by the gambols They make from rock to rock along the woods, Half-boys by their face and by their voice And the art of playing in the resonant hollow of flutes, Born of the plants whose hands pour upon their necks The shadow that tickles them and prowls at the play of muscles, The Fauns go dancing, frolicking, or lie in ambush To watch a gleam beneath the trellis of branches, Or pursue the rustic nymph who suddenly pours forth Among the fleecy bushes as a fugitive spring And defies their call and their chase.

---

This cahier presents a collection of poems by Rene Salome, written in a richly textured, symbolist style that draws on classical mythology and the natural world. The poems are dedicated to the memory of Eddy Marix and explore themes of landscape, memory, the life of the senses, and the effort to draw “closer to things” — to apprehend the world in its immediate, sensory reality rather than through abstraction.

The full French text is available at the Archive.org link above.