Surrealist, Lover, Resistant
Page 18
Holding precious hostages, he is not prepared
(So it seems) to pay you a second time his ransom:
Treasures of a pure heart never can be shared.
Get away from water, from gallows and from gaols
Farewell! I shall leave like a death at dawn of day.
What will keep us distant won’t be weary miles
But the words: I loved her! murmured far away.
Adorable sign writ in stagnant water
Muddy depths
You fishes skirting the seaweed
Where is the spring I have heard burbling so long but never found
That ceaselessly closes heavy clanging doors?
Stagnant waters Invisible spring.
Criminal! Wait for me where the path goes curving through tall hemlock.
Like clouds evenings are born and die at random, with this tattoo above the left breast: ‘Tomorrow’
Water seeps slowly from a cracked bottle from which renowned astrologers come to drink the elixir of life
While a man with his eyes shut can only repeat: ‘Lose one stork, find two’
And hemlock wilts in the rendezvous’ shadow
And Tomorrow, punctual but disguised as a magistrate, opens a great red umbrella right out in open country where the farmers’-wives of dawn dry their washing.
Livid effigies marble phantoms erect in night-palaces
A floorboard creaks
A sword falls of its own accord and sticks in the ground
And I walk straight through a series
Of big empty rooms whose polished floors reflect like water.
There are hands in this marshy night
A white hand that’s like a living person
It’s the hand I’d like to put my lips to and I don’t dare.
There are terrible hands
Inky black hand of a sad schoolboy
Red hand on the wall of a room of crime
Pale hand of a dead woman
Hands holding a knife or a revolver
Hands open
Hands closed
Abject hands clutching a pen-holder
My own hand you as well yes you
My hand with your lines and yet that’s it
Why stain your mysterious lines
Why? Rather handcuffs rather self-harm rather rather
Write write it’s a letter to her and this impure way is a way to move her
Hands extended hands proffered
Is there one sincere hand among them
Oh I no longer dare shake hands
Lying hands craven hands hands I hate
Hands that confess that tremble when I look into eyes
Is there any hand I can still shake with confidence?
Hands on lips of love
Hands on a heart lacking love
Hands at the fire of love
Hands to cut off for false love
Hands low on love
Hands dead to love
Hands forced for love
Hands raised over love
Hands held over love
Hands high over love
Hands reaching to love
All hands on love
Hands happy with love
Hands kneading outside love horrible hands
Hands linked by love eternally
Hands washed by love by implacable waves
Hands by hand it’s love at large
Hands full it’s love again
Hands bearing weapons it’s true love
Masterful hands hands of love
Hand hot with love
Hand offered to love
Hand of justice hand of love
Strong hand in love!
Hands Hands every hand
A man drowns a hand comes out of the sea
A man leaves a hand is waved
A hand clenches a heart suffers
A hand closes o wrath divine
A hand another hand
A hand on my shoulder
Who is it?
Is it you at last?
It’s too dark! What shadows!
Whose hands I don’t know any more
What they want
What they’re saying
Hands deceive
I still remember white hands in the gloom stretched on a table waiting
I remember hands whose grasp was dear to me
And now I don’t know
Too many traitors too many liars
Even my own hand as it writes
A knife! a weapon! An instrument! Anything but writing!
Blood, blood!
Be patient! that day will dawn!
Withered dog-roses pressed in albums
Yellow leaves
Everything creaks in this bedroom
Like herbs underfoot in a night alley.
Great invisible wings pin my arms and the boom of a distant sea reaches my ears.
My bed rolls its foam fringe till dawn and dawn does not appear
Will never appear.
Broken glass, rotten woodwork, endless dreams, withered flowers,
Through the dark a white white hand is laid on my brow,
And I will listen till the unlikely dawn of day
To a bird of paradise flying into walls and furniture, the bird I caged by mistake
Just by closing my eyes.
Dawn the loud shouts the wash-place turning blue
Dawn the soap wetted in black rivers’ flow
Never this bruised night dawn’s ebullience
On empty glasses and our trembling hands
Night dark trees’ daughter uncontainable
That makes the grappling-chains in harbours squeal
The night of loveless nights dream-suffocator
The night of blood of fire of war no quarter
The night of feet that lost their way on stairs
And tramped on landings, night of lewd affairs,
Of fallings into depths, of shackles clanking
In halls of crime, of naked spectres sneaking
Between the sheets, of weakened sleepers waking.
On scrawny chests they feel the hot blood froth
Angina-foam comes rising to their teeth
Black shade a hairy vampire is caressed
They are indifferent if the ravening beast
Is their own heartbeat in their sullied chest.
Night of dim echoes and of coal-fires doused
Bright blaze in mirrors to destruction roused
Blind hands that grope for pennies in a chest
The night of loveless nights absconding sheets
Night of policemen’s whistles in the streets
Night! cruel night when evening dresses quail
When voices whisper at the sick bedside
Night closed for evermore by bolts of steel
Night solitary night no star no guide!
See in your eyes and heart and in the sky
The blurry cosmos flaring suddenly
The fissure swelling tight and luminous
As if some tawny beast with idle claws
Had crushed the night and shredded it (although
Dawn will be watery, the flood-tide slow)
The brittle crystal’s shot with nerves and veins
Fault-lines that mime the serpent’s writhing turns
That roll and intertwine in a strange dawn’s
Pale glimmer. Likewise when the player tired
Of turning over each symbolic card
Sees cruel daybreak light the portico
Then half-forgotten thou
ghts and yearnings go
Like torn fans dropped in upstairs corridors.
So hush put down your pen and close your ears
To slow and heavy steps that mount the stairs
The night grows pallid but the dawn appears
Like moths dead at the base of chandeliers.
A phantom storm gives your defiant eyes
To passion’s tear-drops as a sacrifice.
Heaven’s a faded photo, worn away
By scrutiny, a mere long holiday.
Cry out call up the mermaid and the star
If you can’t sleep hands clasped lips closed as well
A knight in stone observing debonair
A godless sky an uncomplaining hell.
RISE UP!
LOVER
YOUKI FOUJITA
YOUKI 1930 POÉSIE
FONTAINE
La fontaine brisée m’a dit quelle était sa vie
Toujours mouillée toujours pleurant
Et les terrifiantes histoires que raconte l’eau
Quand elle sort de terre
Les poissons monstrueux qu’elle a portés
Et patati et patata
Ce n’est pas une vie rose
Que la vie d’une fontaine brisée.
YOUKI 1930 POETRY
FOUNTAIN
The shattered fountain told me about its life
Always wet always weeping
And the terrifying tales that water tells
When it comes out of the ground
The monstrous fishes it has had in it
Di da di da
It’s no bed of roses
The life of a shattered fountain.
SOIR
Jadis un cœur battait dans cette poitrine
Il ne battait que pour elle
Le cœur bat toujours mais on ne sait plus pourquoi
Celui-là a clos ses lèvres à jamais
Il ne dit plus Il ne dira jamais plus
le mot amour
Peut-être le cœur bat-il toujours pour elle
Il bat sûrement encore pour elle
Mais il bat dans le silence
Ce doit être une triste nuit
Que la nuit de celui-là
Qui écoute battre son cœur
Il l’écoute il bat comme aux grands jours
Comme aux jours délicieux
Comme aux jours d’illusion
Mais l’amour n’a plus le droit de se révéler
Par la parole de ce veilleur acharné
Obstiné à aimer et à souffrir
Et si elle aussi a un cœur
Un soir elle viendra à pas de loup
Fermer ces yeux qui fixent son image dans l’obscurité
Et mettre sur le silence de cet amour
Le silence immense et sifflant du sommeil
Mais alors elle apparaîtra dans un rêve
Et tout sera à recommencer.
EVENING
A heart used to beat in this breast
Beating only for her
The heart still beats but no-one knows why
He has closed his lips for ever
He never says He will never say again
the word love
Perhaps the heart still beats for her
Surely it still beats for her
But it beats in silence
It must be a sad night
This night of his
Listening to his heart beating
He listens it beats like in the great days
Like in the delicious days
Like in the days of delusion
But love is no longer allowed to show itself
By order of this desperate insomniac
Hell-bent on loving and suffering
And if she too has a heart
One evening she’ll come tiptoeing up
To close these eyes that pinpoint her image in the dark
And to cap the silence of this love
With the immense whistling silence of sleep
But then she will re-appear in a dream
And it’ll all have to start over again.
À L’AUBE
Le matin s’écroule comme une pile d’assiettes
En milliers de tessons de porcelaine et d’heures
Et de carillons
Et de cascades
Jusque sur le zinc de ce bistro très pauvre
Où les étoiles persistent dans la nuit du café
Elle n’est pas pauvre
Celle-là dans sa robe de soirée souillée de boue
Mais riche des réalités du matin
De l’ivresse de son sang
Et du parfum de son haleine que nulle insomnie ne peut altérer
Riche d’elle-même et de tous les matins
Passés présents et futurs
Riche d’elle-même et du sommeil qui la gagne
Du sommeil rigide comme un acajou
Du sommeil et du matin et d’elle-même
Et de toute sa vie qui ne se compte
Que par matinées, aubes éclatantes
cascades, sommeils,
Nuits vivantes
Elle est riche celle-là
Même si elle tend la main
Et doit dormir au frais matin
Dans sa robe crottée
sur un lit de désert.
AT DAWN
Morning shatters like a pile of dishes
Into thousands of shards of china and of hours
And peals of bells
And waterfalls
Down to the zinc counter of this beggars’ bar
Where the stars persist in the coffee-cup night.
She is no beggar
That one in her mud-soiled evening gown
But rich with the morning’s realities
The intoxication of her blood
And the scent of her breath that no insomnia can alter
Rich with herself and all the mornings
Past present and future
Rich with herself and the sleep that overtakes her
Sleep stiff as mahogany
Sleep and morning and herself
And her whole life which is reckoned only
In mornings, brilliant dawns
Waterfalls, sleeps,
Living nights
She’s rich, that one
Even if she holds out her hand
And must sleep in morning chill
In her muddy dress
On a folding bed.
NUITS
Femmes de grand air
Femmes de plein vent
Est-ce que la nuit est douce pour vous
Femmes de plein vent
Rôdeuses rencontrées à l’aube
Est-ce que la nuit ne vous déchire pas
Femmes de grand air
Laboureuses perdues dans les plaines
Est-ce que la nuit est une moisson pour vous
Femmes de plein vent
Marchandes de poissons aux mains crevassées
Est-ce que la nuit coule vite pour vous
Femmes réveillées au petit jour
Femmes traînant au travail des pieds meurtris
Est-ce que la nuit est sans écho pour vous
La nuit est-elle douce?
La nuit vous déchire-t-elle?
Moissonnez-vous la nuit?
La nuit coule-t-elle vite pour vous?
Femmes de grand air
Femmes de plein vent
Femmes de la nuit de l’aube et du jour
Rôdeuses laboureuses poissonnières
Aimez-vous l
e plein air
Aimez-vous le grand vent?
NIGHTS
Women of great airs
Women of fresh winds
Is the night kind for you
Women of fresh winds
Rovers met at dawn
Doesn’t the night hurt you
Women of great airs
Labourers lost in the plains
Is night your harvest-time
Women of fresh winds
Fishmongers with chapped hands
Does night go fast for you
Women woken before dawn
Women dragging bruised feet to work
Has night no echo for you
Is the night kind?
Does the night hurt you?
Do you harvest at night?
Does night run fast for you?
Women of great airs
Women of fresh winds
Women of night of dawn and of day
Rovers labourers fishmongers