At Arles where rolls the Rhone

In the atrocious midday light

A man of phosphor and blood

Gives a haunting groan

Like a woman giving birth

And the man flees howling

Pursued by the sun

A sun of strident yellow

To a whorehouse near the Rhone

The man comes like a christmas king

With his absurd present

He has the blue and gentle look

The true mad lucid look

Of those who give life everything

Of those who are not jealous

And shows the poor child

His ear couched in the cloth

And she cries without understanding anything

Imagining sad omens

And looks without daring to take

The frightful tender shell

In which the moans of dead love

And the inhuman voices of art

Mix with the murmurs of the sea

And die on the tiling

In the room where the red eiderdown

Of a sudden bursting red

Blends this red so red

With the much more redder blood

Of half-dead Vincent

And wise as the very image

Of misery and love

The nude child all alone and ageless

Looks upon poor Vincent

Stricken by his own storm

Which spreads on the tile

Onto his most beautiful painting

And the storm runs out indifferent

Rolling before it its great barrels of blood

The dazzling storm of Vincent's genius

And Vincent stays there sleeping waking croaking

And the sun over the whorehouse

Like a mad orange in a nameless desert

The sun on Arles

Howling turns around.