2014

Make it so daylight does not enter

Who’s there?

With his cages full of red wheels

Let him finish setting his egrets outside

A rose window of sky-colored grass on which you walk

Between the cobblestones

I see silent caravans much like an accordion on a table

I see the water flowers arranged by species along a riverbank you are

following

I see night such as birds make with their big square eyes

Birds that have a mirror relationship with fireflies

Not long ago in the country they built large iron constructions

Which are beautiful and tall and like my love

Armatures that are only good for love and the sky

They still don’t know what they are used for

The geniuses that watch over your hands to keep them from lighting,

     lighting

In the beam of a lighthouse I see white ships falling into distress one

     by one

The geniuses that watch over your hands over your eyes so that they’ll

     be light spinning pins

In the wheels of bird cages 

Augustus Pablo: Bass and Drum Version (Link)

Slapp Happy: Working At The Ministry (Link)

Excerpt: André Breton, “Make It So Daylight,” trans. Mark Polizzotti

EYES WIDE SHUT

In Paris the Saint-Jacques Tower tottering

Like a sunflower

Sometimes bumps its forehead against the Seine and its shadow

glides

    Imperceptibly among the tugboats

At that moment on tiptoe in my sleep

I head for the room where I am lying

And I set it on fire

So that nothing survives of the consent torn from me

Then the furniture makes room for animals the same size that watch

    me like a brother 

Lions in whose manes the chairs are finally burnt up

Dogfish whose white bellies blend with the last shiver of the

bedsheets

At the hour of love and blue eyelids

Next I see myself burning I see that solemn hiding-place of nothings

That was my body 

Raked by the patient beaks of the ibises of fire

When it’s all over invisible I board the ark

 

André Breton, “Vigilance” (excerpt), ca. 1931, tr. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow, from André Breton – Selections, ed. Mark Polizzotti, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2003.

Last night in bed, we talked about Automatic Writing.  I can’t remember the last time we did that.