The Snake That Dances

By Charles Baudelaire

How I love to watch, dear indolence, like a bright shimmer, of fabric, the skin of your elegant body glimmer! Over the bitter-tasting perfume, the depths of your hair, odorous, restless spume, blue, and brown, waves, there, like a vessel that stirs, awake when dawn winds rise, my dreaming soul sets sail for those distant skies. Your eyes where nothings revealed either acrid or sweet, are two cold jewels where steel and gold both meet. Seeing your rhythmic advance, your fine abandon, one might speak of a snake that danced at the end of the branch its on. Under its burden of languidness, your heads child-like slant, rocks with weak listlessness like a young elephants, and your body heels and stretches like some trim vessel that rocking from side to side, plunges its yards in the swell. As when the groaning glaciers thaw fills the flowing stream, so when your mouths juices pour to the tip of your teeth, I fancy Im drinking overpowering, bitter, Bohemian wine, that over my heart will scatter its stars, a liquid sky!