REMY DE GOURMONT
307
To the volutes of air, of clouds and of smoke, to that which moves, plays, laughs, and dances the fraternal dance. It is a beautiful thing, a woman's head.
XIII
I have not told the world of the mouth and all its sensualities. The mouth is the mouth with its lips, its teeth and tongue; the lips are almost all the mouth; they are the mouth one sees, the mouth which tempts the mouth when one is thirsty
For love. Mouths are chaste or unchaste according to the spot where they are placed, and they are placed everywhere, like birds, on all high boughs and all low boughs, among the grains and the fruits. All their flesh is savoury
In the existence they love. Mouths area pleasure. Mouths are creatresses of pleasure. I will not write the litany of the sensualities of the mouth. It is too long and too secret.
Mouths refuse to reveal their joys. They keep them in their wrinkles and taste them again in the shadow. Kisses are a thing of shadow, but they light the night like the stars.
XIV
I do not unveil the beauty of my dream; I carve an hypothesis in the marble of eternal logic; I fill with the necessary flesh the thoracic cavity, the spined curve of the vertebrae, the rigid wings of the large butterflies, and the ischiatic caves.
It is necessary. I do not forget you, O sacrum! nor you, femurs! I raise the whole framework, and I bind and fasten it with the supple tissue of the muscles and with the skin, that tight mantle which gives the clay the exterior form I desire,
The form that it is impossible for me to deny, for it is projected in my studio by the very rays of your eyes, the laugh of your mouth, and the dimples
That your neck makes when your head is turned toward me to enchant. The wheel of a gear is supported by another wheel. The gesture that is seen orders the hidden gesture.
XV
I proceed from the known to the unknown. The head is the flower of the neck, and the neck grows out of the shoulders as the
