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SURREALIST
POETRY
Ten Surrealist
Poems
by Federico Garcia
Lorca, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, Robert
Desnos, Benjamin Peret, Paul Eluard and Pierre
Unik
.
Dawn in New York
has
four columns of
mire
and a hurricane of
black pigeons
splashing in
the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York
groans
on enormous fire
escapes
searching between
the angles
for spikenards
of drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives
it in his mouth
because
morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned
children.
Those who go out early know in
their bones
there will be
no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and
laws,
in mindless games,
in fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains
and noises
in the impudent
challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just
escaped a shipwreck of blood.
Poet in New
York 1929-1930
Sleepless City
Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
No one
sleeps.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their
cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not
dream,
and the brokenhearted fugitive will meet on street
corners
an unbelievable alligator resting beneath the tender
protest of the
stars.
Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no
one.
No one sleeps.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who
has moaned for three years
because of an arid landscape in his
knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was
necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
Life is not a
dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs
in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the snow's edge
with the voices of dead dahlias.
But there is
no oblivion; no dream:
only flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a tangle
of new veins,
and those who hurt will hurt without
rest
and those who are afraid of death will carry it
on their shoulders.
One day
horses will live in the
saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow
skies that take refuge in the
eyes of cows.
Another day
we
will watch the dried butterflies rise from the dead
and still
walking through a landscape of gray sponges and silent ships
we
will watch our ring flash while roses spill from our
tongues.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
Those
still marked by claws and thunderstorms,
and that boy who cries
because he has never heard of the invention
of bridges,
or
that corpse who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must
carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes
are
waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified
hand of the boy is waiting,
and the fur of the camel stands on end
with a violent blue chill.
Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one,
no one.
No one sleeps.
But if someone does close his eyes,
whip
him, my children, whip him!
Let there be a landscape of open
eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
Out in the sky, no one sleeps.
No one, no one.
I have said it before.
No one is sleeping.
But if
someone grows too much moss on his temples during the
night,
open
the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the fake
goblets, the poison, and the skull of the theaters.
Poet in New
York 1929-1930
Andre Breton
Free Union
My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of
heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an
otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with her rosette
mouth and a bouquet of stars of the last magnitude
With the
teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of
rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed
host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With
the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with her eyelashes in
the strokes of a child's writing
With
eyebrows from the edge of a swallow's
nest
My wife with brows of slates on a hothouse roof
And with steam
on the windowpanes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain
with dolphin heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My
wife with fingers of luck and the ace of hearts
With fingers of mown
hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer
Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of
riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with
legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife
with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With
feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of
unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a
tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife
with her undersea molehill breasts
My wife with breasts of the
ruby's crucible
With breasts of the spectre of the rose beneath
the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of
days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a
bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of
light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a
glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a
skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts
of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with
buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans'
backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My
wife with the sex of placer and platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed
and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes
full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic
needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to be
drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My
wife with eyes of water-level air-level earth and
fire
1931
Antonin
Artaud
Dark Poet
Dark Poet, a maid's
breast
Haunts you,
Embittered poet, life seethes
And life
burns,
And the sky reabsorbs itself in rain,
Your pen scratches at
the heart of life.
Forest, forest, alive with your eyes,
On
multiple pinions;
With storm-bound hair,
The poets mount horses,
dogs.
Eyes fume, tongues stir,
The heavens surge into our
senses
Like blue mother's milk;
Women, harsh vinegar hearts,
I
hang suspended from your mouths.
Umbilical Limbo 1926
Robert
Desnos
I've Dreamed of You So Much
I've dreamed of you so much that you're
losing your reality.
Is it already too late for me to embrace your
living and breathing body
and to kiss that mouth which is the
birthplace of that voice so dear to me?
I've dreamed of you so much
that my arms, grown accustomed to lying crossed upon my own chest in a
desperate attempt to encircle your shadow, might not be able to unfold
again to embrace the contours of your body.
And coming face-to-face
with the actual incarnation of what has haunted me and ruled me and
dominated my life for so many days and years
might very well turn me
into a shadow.
Oh equilibriums of the emotional scales!
I've dreamed
of you so much that it might be too late for me to ever wake up again.
I sleep on my feet, body confronting all the usual phenomena of life
and love, and yet when it comes to you,
the only being on the planet
who matters to me now,
I can no more touch your face and lips than I
can those of the next random passerby.
I've dreamed of you so much,
have walked and talked and slept so much with your phantom presence that
perhaps the only thing left for me to do now
is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadowy
than that shadow
which moves and will go on moving,
stepping lightly and joyfully across
the sundial of your life.
A la mysterieuse 1926
Sleep
Spaces
In the night there are of course the seven
wonders of the world
and greatness, tragedy and
enchantment.
Forests collide with legendary creatures hiding in
thickets.
There is you.
In
the night there are the walker's footsteps the murderer's the town policeman's light from the street
lamp and the ragman's lantern.
There is you.
In the night trains go
past and boats
and the fantasy of countries where it's daytime. The
last breaths of twilight and the first shivers of dawn.
There is
you.
A piano tune, a shout.
A door slams. A clock.
And not only
beings and things and physical sounds.
But also me chasing myself or
endlessly going beyond me.
There is you the sacrifice, you that I'm
waiting for.
Sometimes at the moment of sleep strange figures are born
and disappear.
When I shut my eyes phosphorescent blooms appear and
fade
and come to life again like fireworks made of flesh.
I pass
through strange lands with creatures for company.
No doubt you are
there, my beautiful discreet spy.
And the palpable soul of the vast
reaches.
And perfumes of the sky and the stars, the song of a rooster
from 2000 years ago and piercing screams in a flaming park and
kisses.
Sinister handshakes in a sickly light and axles grinding on
paralyzing roads.
No doubt there is you who I do not know, who on the
contrary I do know.
But who, here in my dreams, demands to be felt
without ever appearing.
You who remain out of reach in reality and in
dream.
You who belong to me through my will to possess your
illusion
but who brings your face near mine only if my eyes are closed
in dream as well as in reality.
You who in spite of an easy rhetoric
where the waves die on the beach
where crows fly into ruined factories,
where the wood rots
crackling under a lead sun.
You who are at the
depths of my dreams stirring up a mind
full of metamorphoses
leaving me your glove when I kiss your hand.
In the night there are
stars and the shadowy motion of the sea,
of rivers, forests, towns,
grass and the lungs
of millions and millions of beings.
In the night
there are the seven wonders of the world.
In the night there are no
guardian angels, but there is sleep.
In the night there is you.
In
the daylight too.
A la mysterieuse
1926
Benjamin
Peret
Wink
Parakeets fly through my head when I see you in profile
and the
greasy sky streaks with blue flashes
tracing your name in all
directions
Rosa coiffed with a black tribe standing in rows on the
stairs
where women's piercing breasts point out through men's
eyes
Today I look out through your hair
Rosa of morning opal
and
I wake through your site
Rosa of armour
I think through your
exploding breasts
Rosa of a pool the frogs turn green
and I sleep in
your navel of Caspian sea
Rosa of honeysuckle in the general
strike
and I'm lost in your milky way shoulders impregnated
by comets
Rosa of jasmine in the night of washing
Rosa of
haunted house
Rosa of black forest filled with blue and
green postage stamps
Rosa of kite over a vacant lot where children
are fighting
Rosa of cigar smoke
Rosa of seafoam turned
into crystal
Rosa
Je Sublime
1936
Paul
Eluard
Max
Ernst
In a corner agile incest
Circles the
virginity of a little dress.
In a corner the sky turned over
To the
spines of the storm leaves white balls behind.
In the brightest
corner of every eye
We're expecting the fish of anguish.
In a corner
the car of summer
Immobile glorious and forever.
In the light of
youth
Lamps lit very late.
The first one shows its breasts that red
insects are killing.
Captial of Pain
1926
The Absence
I speak to you
across cities
I speak to you across plains
My mouth is upon
your pillow
Both faces of the walls come meeting
My voice
discovering you
I speak to you of eternity
O cities
memories of cities
Cities wrapped in our desires
Cities come early
cities come lately
Cities strong and cities secret
Plundered of
their master's builders
All their thinkers all their ghosts
Fields pattern of emerald
Bright living surviving
The
harvest of the sky over our earth
Feeds my voice I dream and weep
I
laugh and dream among the flames
Among the clusters of the sun
And over my body your body spreads
The sheet of it's bright
mirror.
1942
Pierre
Unik
The Manless
Society
Morning trickles over the bruised vegetables
like
a drop of sweat over the lines of my hand
I crawl over the
ground
with stem and wrinkled mouth
the sun swells into the canals
of monstrous leaves
which recover cemeteries harbours houses
with
the same sticky green zeal
then with disturbing intensity there passes
through my mind
the absurdity of human groupings
in these lines of
closely packed houses
like the pores of the skin
in the poignant
void of terrestrial space
I hear the crying of birds of whom it used to
be said
that they sang and implacable resembled stones
I see flocks
of houses munching the pith of the air
factories which sing as birds
once sang
roads which lose themselves in harvests of salt
pieces of
sky which become dry on verdigris moss
a pulley's creaking tells us
that a bucket rises in a well
it is full of limpid blood
which
evaporates in the sun
nothing else will trouble this circuit on the
ground
until evening
which trembles under the form of an immense
pinned butterfly
at the entrance of a motionless
station.
Date
Unknown
RECOMMENDED READING
"Bash is one of the few contemporary
playwrights who captures the spirit of surrealism. In fact, surrealist
figures from the past, such as Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali and Paul Eluard,
appear as characters in a couple of his plays. Dream-like, funny, and
sometimes disturbing, SANCTUS FUMIGACI (which, in English, loosely
translates to "Holy Smoke") is recommended for fans of avant garde
literature and experimental theater."