Surrealist, Lover, Resistant

by Robert Desnos

  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