June 22: Really Tired, Arthur Rimbaud, "Evening Prayer"

I am really tired this evening after a long week of grading and writing and planning.

I tend to stay up very late at night, and I always get up early in the morning.  That's my life.  Now, getting to bed close to midnight and rising at 4:45 a.m. tends to wear a person down after a while.  After a few weeks, I usually have to just go to bed and sleep for a very long time.

I'm reaching that point, I think.  Maybe not tonight or tomorrow.  Soon.

Saint Marty has a little prayer from Rimbaud for tonight.

Evening Prayer

by:  Arthur Rimbaud

I spend my life sitting - like an angel
in the hands of a barber - a deeply fluted beer mug
in my fist, belly and neck curved,
a Gambier pipe in my teeth, under the air
swelling with impalpable veils of smoke.

Like the warm excrements in an old dovecote,
a thousand dreams burn softly inside me,
and at times my sad heart is like sap-wood bled
on by the dark yellow gold of its sweats.

Then, when I have carefully swallowed my dreams,
I turn, having drunk thirty or forty tankards,
and gather myself together to relieve bitter need:
As sweetly as the Saviour of Hyssops
and of Cedar I piss towards dark skies,
very high and very far;
and receive the approval of the great heliotropes.