Regardez le jour noircit au feu qui s’allume dans l’âtre
Regardez encore s’éloigner les herbes vivantes
Et les femmes effeuillant la marguerite du silence
Adieu dans la boue noire des gares
Dans les empreintes des mains sur les murs
Chaque fois qu’une marche d’escalier s’écroule un timide enfant paraît à la fenêtre mansardée
Ce n’est plus dit-il le temps des parcs feuillus
J’écrase sans cesse des larves sous mes pas
Adieu dans le claquement des voiles
Adieu dans le bruit monotone des moteurs
Adieu ô papillons écrasés dans les portes
Adieu vêtements souillés par les jours à trotte-menu
Perdus à jamais dans les ombres des corridors
Nous t’appelons du fond des échos de la terre
Sinistre bienfaiteur anémone de lumière et d’or
Et que brisé en mille volutes de mercure
Éclate en braises nouvelles à jamais incandescentes
L’amour miroir qui sept ans fleurit dans ses fêlures
Et cire l’escalier de la sinistre descente
Abîme nous t’appelons du fond des échos de la terre
Maîtresse généreuse de la lumière de l’or et de la chute
Dans l’écume de la mort et celle des Finistères
Balançant le corps souple des amoureuses
Dans les courants marqués d’initiales illisibles
Maîtresse sinistre et bienfaisante de la perte éternelle
Ange d’anthracite et de bitume
Claire profondeur des rades mythologie des tempêtes
Eau purulente des fleuves eau lustrale des pluies et des rosées
Créature sanglante et végétale des marées
Du marteau sur l’enclume au couteau de l’assassin
Tout ce que tu brises est étoile et diamant
Ange d’anthracite et de bitume
Éclat du noir orfraie des vitrines
Des fumées lourdes te pavoisent quand tu poses les pieds
Sur les cristaux de neige qui recouvrent les toits
Haletants de mille journaux flambant après une nuit d’encre fraîche
Les grands mannequins écorchés par l’orage
Nous montrent ce chemin par où nul n’est venu
Où donc est l’oreiller pour mon front fatigué
Où donc sont les baisers où donc sont les caresses
Pour consoler un cœur qui s’est trop prodigué
Où donc est mon enfant ma fleur et ma détresse
Me pardonnant si des brouillards bandent mes yeux
Si j’ai l’air d’être ailleurs si j’ai l’air d’être un autre
Me pardonnant de croire au noir au merveilleux
D’avoir des souvenirs qui ne soient pas les nôtres
Pardonnant mon passé mon cœur mes cicatrices
D’avoir parcouru seul d’émouvantes contrées
D’avoir été tenté par des voix tentatrices
Et de ne pas l’avoir plus vite rencontrée
Saurait-elle oublier mes rêves d’autrefois
Les fortunes perdues et les larmes versées
L’étoile sans merci brillant au fond des bois
Et les désirs meurtris en des nuits insensées
Et ces phrases tordues comme notre amour même
Et que je murmurais lorsque minuit blafard
Posait ses maigres doigts sur des visages blêmes
Séchant les yeux mouillés et barbouillant les fards
Dans ces temps-là le ciel était lourd de ténèbres
Le sonore minuit conduisait vers mon lit
Des visiteuses sans pitié et plus funèbre
Que la mort l’anémone évoquait la folie
Les fleurs qui s’effeuillaient sur les fruits de l’automne
Laissèrent leurs parfums aux fleurs des compotiers
Et sur le fût tronqué des anciennes colonnes
Le sel des vents marins mit des lueurs de glaciers
Et longtemps ces parfums orgueil des porcelaines
Flotteront dans la paix des salles à manger
Et les cristaux de sel brilleront dans la laine
Des grands manteaux flottants que portent les bergers
Mes baisers rejoindront les larmes qui vont naître
Ils rejoindront la solitude sans pitié
Les vents marins soufflant sur les chaumes sans maîtres
Et les parfums mourants au fond des compotiers
Je suis marqué par mes amours et pour la vie
Comme un cheval sauvage échappé aux gauchos
Qui retrouvant la liberté de la prairie
Montre aux juments ses poils brûlés par le fer chaud
Tandis qu’au large avec de grands gestes virils
La sirène chantant vers un ciel de carbone
Au milieu des récifs éventreurs de barils
Au cœur des tourbillons fait surgir l’anémone.
SIREN-ANEMONE
Who’d see me? I burn
A bright foreign flame
Anemones bloom
By night in my fern
O ferns my two hands
Broke out of their case
In line each one stands
Both lining the ways
Night puts on the style
At braziers of rust
The ferns all the while
Fill up the coal-chest
Anemone of skies
She blooms in my beds
She blooms in the eyes
In the shade of their lids
Anemone of nights
She plunges her roots
In wells’ hollow depths
And mines’ shady clefts
Would they dare to tread
The loud road that rings
Where steel makes its bed
On phosphorus wings
Would they see, the miners
In anthracite cluster
The blossoming lustre
On bankrupted heaven
In this starry shiner’s
Incarnate the siren
Nocturnal anemone
Blooms in her garden
The powers lurched the storm-winds cried aloud
Dizziness on the lightning-rod The siren
Flashed at the bowsprit of a furrow ploughed
And to the moon sang the romance of iron
She swam and tore the ermine of the tides
The comet roaming red across black sky
Appeared by mirage to the anchored stars
The mirror-gardens’ bloom the anemone
And parallel the double head of hair
Sky blazing waters foaming steel that bleeds
Rise up you ferns from lacerations where
The metal bled and stained the line of reeds
No armour could requite your miseries
Ferns rotting in our memories away
Under our breastplates you shall carbonise
Before the flame where rearing up to neigh
The horse old horse we dream of it once more
Takes our dry bones and sweeps them to the lists
Where the wave rolls our heart along the shore
Where in mild sun the sleeping siren rests
Under the keels bloomed the anemone
Keels ripped on reefs in forest greeneries
In tarnished mirrors floors of ebony
And in our hearts that throb and never cease
She is the gem set in the living cloud
Pride of the order
ed stars and galaxies
The eye revealing to the ragged crowd
The diamond of rage and solaces
Glad to swim far from cliff-tops thrusting tall
Among fraternal shoals of sharks she’ll rove
Hard-breasted siren knows the tales they tell
Where shady tunnels lead to treasure-trove
Not shining gold in trenches of the sea
Not clues to quayside lore would she unearth
She’d rather flare her nostrils joyfully
At the salt winds more fraught with scent of death
It was on a spring evening in one of the years lost to love
One of the years gained to love for ever
Remember that evening of rain and dew when the stars that turned to comets were falling earthwards
The loveliest and deadliest the comet of fate of tears and of endlessly getting lost
Was leaving my sky and being reflected in the sea
You were born of that mirage
But you left with the comet and your song died away among the echoes
Should your song have died away for ever
Is it dead and must I look for it in the tumultuous chorus of breaking waves
Or will it be reborn deep in the echoes and the spindrift
When the comet will be lost for ever in empty space
Will you rise you mirage of flesh and bone from your desert of shades
Don’t forget this landscape of midnight of basalt and granite
Where detached from heaven a radiant head of hair descended on your shoulders
What a radiant head of hair of afterglow and of light
Not for nothing do silk dresses tremble in the night
Washed ashore on the beaches coming from the depths
Traces of loves and shipwrecks where the anemone refuses to shed its petals
To yield to the will of the waves and the vegetable fates
Alone step by little step she reaches a refuge of high station
And tells the clock it’s a thousand pities
No it’s not for nothing they throb these wet dresses
Salt crystallises on them in frost-flowers
Drained from loving women’s bodies
And the hands that clasped them
They flee from the tuberous gulfs
Leaving to the clumsy hands that laced them
Breastplates of steel and corsets of satin
Have they not felt the radiant hair of stars
Which on a night of dew fell cascading on your shoulders
I saw it fall
You were transfigured
Will you never return from the shades
Naked and more triumphant from your journey
Than the envelope sealed by five wounds of bleeding wax
O the thousand regrets will never cease
To occupy this clock in the nearby clearing
Your sargasso hair is lost
In the enormous rain-shower of missed assignations
Deserted harbour silently they row
Mother and loving woman who could see
You tip at midnight to the sleeper’s brow
Your eyelid’s bloom the night anemone
Kiss his closed lips and eyes and to his head
Incline your copious hair Siren begone
Back to your waves you Bérénice of shade
Before the opening of the wounds of dawn
From the Atlantic foam a steppe is born
Of coal and snow and moonlight We shall be
Mounted aboard the magic unicorn
Wrapped in the storms we’ll find the anemone
Soot-storm and horse-shaped cloud! Despair! Dear God!
My Lord! The night is shipwrecked is the night?
Now sobs are heard! The carnival! Eyes shut!
Magnificent ship’s company that quite…
And in the sky that oozes with the docks’
Hogsheads the squalls go silent suddenly
Day breaks the siren scrambles on the rocks
Triumphant blooms the sky’s anemone
She rears above volcanoes towering
She throws a bleary light across the plain
Call of the pelican and vulture’s wing
Plan of escape for convicts on the chain
Reflection flickering in window-glass
Bed-linen in the morgue congealed with blood
A mourning-veil that’s rotted on the grass
The ball-gown cut about to make a shroud
Anathema she’s insult she’s the curse
She’s vitriol thrown on a silk brocade
The violated tomb the open hearse
Three generations to the pox betrayed
Christ’s house of shame the thunderbolts of Brest
Spit-balls cocked fists for virgins pure and good
She’s a new people rising pressing west
The dagger and the poison and the rod
She is the invert kneeling to submit
The coprophiliac gargoyle-hideous
The masochist prostrated for the cat
The tart with stinking eyes and boils and pus
Rebarbative the bearded lady’s squeeze
Eye of the leper clouds reflected in
The eunuch stripping off beneath the trees
The urine-fancier with viscous grin
The empire of the senses drunkenness
Sulphur blood tasted in a darling’s kiss
The rightness of no matter what caress
Anemone bruised arms oblivion bliss
I want a naked sky a trackless world
Rain down you stars to fall on heads of hair
Come fogs and swathe in burlap the adored
Dead beauties rotting in the open air
Goodbye so soon among the porcelain hours
Look the day is going black at the fire catching in the hearth
Look again the living grasses are leaving
So are the women plucking petals from the daisy of silence
Goodbye in the black mud of railway stations
In the print-marks of hands on the walls
Whenever a step on the stairs gives way a shy child appears at the mansard window
The season of leafy parks has gone he says
I’m for ever crushing insects as I walk
Goodbye in the clap of sails
Goodbye in the monotonous sound of motors
Goodbye you butterflies crushed in the doors
Goodbye clothes dirtied by days of mucking about
For ever lost in corridors of shade
From echoes deep in earth we call your name
Anemone of light and gold sinister benign
Mercury shivered in one thousand whirls
Love a cracked mirror seven years in bloom
Shall burst out once again in white-hot coals
And wax the staircase of unhallowed doom
Abyss from echoes deep in earth we call your name
Kind mistress of the light and gold and of the fall
In foam of Finistère and deadly spume
Buoying up loving women’s supple body
In currents marked with illegible initials
Sinister benign mistress of eternal loss
Angel of anthracite and bitumen
Bright sea-roads’ depth mythology of storms
Purulent water of rivers lustral water of rains and dews
Swamp-creature bloody and vegetal
From hammer on anvil to assassin’s knife
All that you shatter is star and diamond
Angel of an
thracite and bitumen
Shock of blackness osprey of glass cases
Thick smoke wreathes you as you walk
On the snow crystals covering the roofs
That pant with a thousand newspapers aflame from a night of fresh ink
The great scarecrows scorched by the storm
Show us this road up which nobody came
Where is the pillow for my weary head
Where is the kiss and where is the caress
To soothe a heart that wandered far abroad
Where is my child my flower my distress
To pardon me for visions nebulous
Seeming to be another and not there
Believing in the black the marvellous
And having memories we do not share
To pardon me my heart my past my wounds
For some affecting journeys made alone
For being tempted by alluring sounds
For meeting her when too much time was gone
Could she forget my dreams of yesteryear
Surrealist, Lover, Resistant Page 11
