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No, love is not dead in this heart and these eyes and this mouth
that proclaimed the beginning of its own requiem.
Listen, I've had enough of the picturesque, of colors and charms.
I love love, its tenderness and its cruelty.
The one I love has only a single name, a single form.
Everything goes. Mouths cling to this mouth.
The one I love has only one name, one form.
And some day if you remember it
O you, form and name of my love,
One day on the sea between America and Europe,
When the last ray of sun flashes on the undulating surface of the waves,
or else one stormy night beneath a tree in the country, or in a speeding car,
One spring morning Boulevard Malesherbes,
One rainy day,
At dawn before putting yourself to bed,
Tell yourself, I summon your familiar ghost, that I was the only one to love
you more and what a pity it is you didn't know it.
Tell yourself you shouldn't be sorry for anything: before me Ronsard and
Baudelaire sang the sorrows of old women and dead women who despised the purest love.
You, when you die,
You will still be beautiful and desirable.
I'll already be dead, completely enclosed in your immortal body, in your
astonishing image present forever among the perpetual wonders of life and eternity,
but if I outlive you
Your voice and how it sounds, your gaze and how it shines,
The smell of you and of your hair and many other things will still go on
living in me,
In me, and I'm no Ronsard or Baudelaire,
Just me Robert Desnos who, for having known and loved you,
Is as good as they are.
Just me Robert Desnos who, for loving you
Doesn't want to be remembered for anything else on this despicable earth.

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