I saw the last head with its fingers plaited in curls
And its sides ridged and smooth, worn by runnels of light.
The obvious table supported a map of the moon.
The faces in trees must be stopped, and the towers
And peninsular madness and gems
The canals are all stopped with a white-flowering weed
The beetle conspires to bring doom to the bridge
The night air is salt on the tongue. The white shields
In the stable fall clattering down from the walls.
But the last head is safe in its vegetable dome:
The last head is wrapped in its oiled silk sheath,
While the pale tepid flame of its ichorous brain
Consumes all its body’s dry shells.
c. 1936
PURIFIED DISGUST
An impure sky
A heartless and impure breathing
The fevered breath of logic
And a great bird broke loose
Flapping into the silence with strident cries
A great bird with cruel claws
Beyond that savage pretence of knowledge
Beyond that posture of oblivious dream
Into the divided terrain of anguish
Where one walks with bound hands
Where one walks with knotted hair
With eyes searching the zenith
Where one walks like Sebastian
Heavy flesh invokes the voice of penitence
Seated at the stone tables
Seated at a banquet of the carnal lusts
Behind our putrid masks we snicker
Our men’s heads behind our masks
Twisted from innocence to insolence
And there the pointing finger says and there
The pointing finger demonstrates
The accuser struggles with his accusation
The accused writhes and blusters
The finger points to the chosen victim
The victim embraces his victimization
The accused belches defiance
How could we touch that carrion?
A sudden spasm saves us
A pure disgust illumines us
The music of the spheres is silent
Our hands lie still upon the counterpane
And the herds come home.
p. 1935
CHARITY WEEK
To Max Ernst
Have presented the lion with medals of mud
One for each day of the week
One for each beast in this sombre menagerie
Shipwrecked among the clouds
Shattered by the violently closed eyelids
Garments of the seminary
Worn by the nocturnal expedition
By all the chimeras
Climbing in at the window
With lice in their hair
Noughts in their crosses
Ice in their eyes
Hysteria upon the staircase
Hair torn out by the roots
Lace handkerchiefs torn to shreds
And stained by tears of blood
Their fragments strewn upon the waters
These are the phenomena of zero
Invisible men on the pavement
Spittle in the yellow grass
The distant roar of disaster
And the great bursting womb of desire.
p. 1935
REFLECTED VEHEMENCE
Umbilically detached, of sorrowful mien and at the same time decked out in cobwebs – these vanquished ones, whose breathings propagate violence and fear. Their padded fingers point uselessly to the stars of their own eloquence. It is just the same as ever in the outgrown pavilions of vegetable matter. As though St Valentine had smudged the last letters of a secret pact with the powdered antennae of a forgotten fly. As though flying itself were only circular.
But here where the graphite byways meet, there is bound to be always fresh water. See how the ruched waterfalls reply with shaking heads to the invitations of the warrior-like foliage. They seem to vanish in thin air, gasping for a more fluid means of expression. The tinkling belfries glide away of their own volition. Eggs break during the fencing lesson. Masonry, tightly clamped to the nape of the ritual, buries itself in an indulgently frothing explosion of the head, whereby the closed gates are breathed upon anew by the breezes of loyalty and honour. Thus clouds are born.
In my hand lies the same whispering, nail-headed dude, ever imploring the benefice of a hippograph.
c. 1936
THE END IS NEAR THE BEGINNING
Yes you have said enough for the time being
There will be plenty of lace later on
Plenty of electric wool
And you will forget the eglantine
Growing around the edge of the green lake
And if you forget the colour of my hands
You will remember the wheels of the chair
In which the wax figure resembling you sat
Several men are standing on the pier
Unloading the sea
The device on the trolley says mother’s meat
Which means Until the end.
p. 1935
LOST WISDOM
In the first morning
A cry above the unborn roofs
Of solitude and pain
A faint odour of vegetable matter
Fringing the violet lids of night
And hanging from the water’s eyes
The simulacrum of the damned
Disturbance in the weather makes me see
The little angels without wings
The brittle needles in the sand
The ropy veins of polypi
And all the seamless seams
And now and then
From every abandoned mouth
An unstanched stream must flow
And then as now
The graves were opened once
And gold was melted by the snow
Like lilies sown in sifted stone
And gathered once for all.
p. 1935
UNSPOKEN
Words spoken leave no time for regret
Yet regret
The unviolated silence and
White sanctuses of sleep
Under the heaped veils
The inexorably prolonged vigils
Speech flowing away like water
With its undertow of violence and darkness
Carrying with it forever
All those formless vessels
Abandoned palaces
Tottering under the strain of being
Full-blossoming hysterias
Lavishly scattering their stained veined petals
In sleep there are places places
Places overlap
Yellow sleep in the afternoon sunlight
Coming invisibly in through the pinewood door
White sleep wrapped warm in the midwinter
Inhaling the tepid snow
And sleeping in April at night is sleeping in
Shadow as shallow as water and articulate with pain
Recurrent words
Slipping between the cracks
With the face of memory and the sound of its voice
More intimate than sweat at the roots of the hair
Frozen stiff in a moment and then melted
Swifter than air between the lips
Swifter to vanish than enormous buildings
Seen for a moment from the corners of the eyes
Travelling through man’s enormous continent
No two roads the same
Nor ever the same names to places
Migrating towns and fluid boundaries
There are no settlers here there are
No solid stones
Travelling through man’s unspoken continent
Among the unspeaking mountains
The dumb lakes and the deafened valleys
Illumined by
paroxysms of vision
Clear waves of soundless sight
Lapping out of the heart of darkness
Flowing endless over buried speech
Drowning the words and words
And here I am caught up among the glistenings of
Bodies proud with the opulence of flesh
The silent limbs of beings lying across the light
Silken at the hips and pinched between two fingers
Their thirsty faces turned upwards towards breaking
Their long legs shifting slanting turning
In a parade of unknown virtues
Beginning again and beginning
Again
Till unspoken is unseen
Until unknown
Descending from knowledge to knowledge
A dim world uttering a voiceless cry
Spinning helpless between sleep and waking
A blossom scattered by a motionless wind
A wheel of fortune turning in the fog
Predicting the lucid moment
Casting the bodiless body from its hub
Back into the cycle of return and change
Breathing the mottled petals
Out across the circling seas
And foaming oceans of disintegration
Where navigate our daylight vessels
Following certain routes to uncertain lands
p. 1935
YVES TANGUY
The worlds are breaking in my head
Blown by the brainless wind
That comes from afar
Swollen with dusk and dust
And hysterical rain
The fading cries of the light
Awaken the endless desert
Engrossed in its tropical slumber
Enclosed by the dead grey oceans
Enclasped by the arms of the night
The worlds are breaking in my head
Their fragments are crumbs of despair
The food of the solitary damned
Who await the gross tumult of turbulent
Days bringing change without end.
The worlds are breaking in my head
The fuming future sleeps no more
For their seeds are beginning to grow
To creep and to cry midst the
Rocks of the deserts to come
Planetary seed
Sown by the grotesque wind
Whose head is so swollen with rumours
Whose hands are so urgent with tumours
Whose feet are so deep in the sand.
c. 1936
‘THE TRUTH IS BLIND’
The light fell from the window and the day was done
Another day of thinking and distractions
Love wrapped in its wings passed by and coal-black Hate
Paused on the edge of the cliff and dropped a stone
From which the night grew like a savage plant
With daggers for its leaves and scarlet hearts
For flowers – then the bed
Rose clocklike from the ground and spread its sheets
Across the shifting sands
Autumnal breath of mornings far from here
A star veiled in grey mist
A living man:
The snapping of a dry twig was his only announcement. The two men, who had tied their boat to a branch that grew out over the water’s edge, and were now moving up through the rank tropical vegetation, turned sharply.
He raised his eyes and saw the river’s source
Between their legs – he saw the flaming sun
He saw the buildings in between the leaves
Behind their heads that were as large as globes
He heard their voices indistinct as rain
As faint as feathers falling
And he fell
The boat sailed on
The masts were made of straw
The sails were made of finest silken thread
And out of holes on either side the prow
Gushed endless streams of water and of flame
In which the passengers saw curious things:
The conjuror, we are told, ‘took out of his bag a silken thread, and so projected it upwards that it stuck fast in a certain cloud of air. Out of the same receptacle he pulled a hare, that ran away up along the thread; a little beagle, which when it was slipped at the hare pursued it in full cry; last of all a small dogboy, whom he commanded to follow both hare and hound up the thread. From another bag that he had he extracted a winsome young woman, at all points well adorned, and instructed her to follow after hound and dogboy.’
She laughed to see them gazing after her
She clapped her hands and vanished in thin air
To reappear upon the other bank
Among the restless traffic of the quays
Her silhouette against the dusty sky
Her shadow falling on the hungry stones
Where sat the pilot dressed in mud-stained rags
He knocked the fragile statue down
And ate her sugar head
And then the witnesses all gathered round
And pointed at the chasm at his feet:
Clouds of blue smoke, sometimes mixed with black, were being emitted from the exhaust pipe. The smoke was of sufficient density to be an annoyance to the driver following the vehicle or to pedestrians.
The whispering of unseen flames
A sharp taste in the mouth.
p. 1935
THE CAGE
In the waking night
The forests have stopped growing
The shells are listening
The shadows in the pools turn grey
The pearls dissolve in the shadow
And I return to you
Your face is marked upon the clockface
My hands are beneath your hair
And if the time you mark sets free the birds
And if they fly away towards the forest
The hour will no longer be ours
Ours is the ornate birdcage
The brimming cup of water
The preface to the book
And all the clocks are ticking
All the dark rooms are moving
All the air’s nerves are bare.
Once flown
The feathered hour will not return
And I shall have gone away.
c. 1936
EDUCATIVE PROCESS
1
What though the weather changes?
What though you do not sleep?
(Forget the wasteproducts of love)
Whiteness envelops houses
To prepare to begin to prepare
And snow on the roofs,
Your horror of snow!
2
The month’s pocket holds many days
The paraphernalia of seeing and hearing.
3
The feathers fledged from your flesh meet mine
And ardent haloes meet like plates above our heads
You are not gentle.
4
Crescendo of flames, the steps
Of stone that lead into the swamp
Where wanderings begin and the first birds
The last birds, the sun’s bicycle racing,
Our eyes lose one another, autumn splutters
On the sidewalks houses eat the afternoon
Soft outline of the leaves upon the wall
Foliage blown by the wind
Streams into the memory of hair.
5
Wire twisted back bites into the cheek
The gardens of neurosis.
6
Swift algebra of love pretends
That barriers must fall
To gourmandize the warriors of sleep
To sacrifice the carrion
To call home lightnings wandering in the fields
To live life twice.
7
A drop
of dew sings psalms upon the hill
Anatomies of wonder opened at the first page
The last page showing the number 3 like a silken knot.
Rockets open the sky like keys
And your breath is warning
Warning the footsteps of Truth
Not to wander too far away
For clutching hands and agonized eyes
Move with their shadows upon the imaginary screen.
8
Hooped foliage, tired antimony,
Blossoms of crumbling columns beneath our feet
Journeys stretch far away and there is the sea
The sea is as salt as health with its marble veins.
9
The glass on the table is empty and so are your eyes.
Footsteps. The shadow just outside the door.
And do you suppose that forgetting
Is as easy as air?
The flowers’ voice is evil, the caves
Are asleep. In the grass
Children playing take fear at the clouds carved like skulls.
10
I had forgotten to watch the wind
The wind playing with boats the wind
Shuffling the sands like cards –
But we cannot change now that daylight is here
Negotiations with the infinite
Upon the empty beach.
c. 1936
ANTENNAE
1
A river of perfumed silk
A final glimpse of content
The girls are alone on the highroad.
2
In the evening there is a cry of despair
Silence begins spawning its myriad
Shifting away from the restless neon auras
Disturbed by the menacing gestures of starvation
The unchanging programme of its manoeuvres
Its rasping grasping claws.
3
The sun bursts through its skin
The last smooth man emerges from the tunnel
And flags burst into song along the streets
The morning’s garlands pull themselves to pieces
And fly away in flocks
The sea is a bubble in a cup of salt
The earth is a grain of sand in a nutshell
The earth is blue.
4
Truth, fickle monster, gazed in at the open window
Longing to eat of the fruit of the poisoned tree
Longing to eat from the plates on our lozenge-shaped table
Fearing the truth
And the peaceful star of the vigil fell from the sky
And spilt its amazing fluids across the mosaic floor.