Benjamin PERET – Surrealist poem published in “Feu Central” in 1947.

Benjamin PERET (1889.1959)

Autograph manuscript signed.

Two pages in-8°.

Mexico. December 5, 1944.

Beautiful manuscript of his surrealist poem published in Feu Central in 1947.

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NORTH WIND

At midnight, by the rivers of asphalt,
I saw the shadow of a wooden sun whistling an untapped quarry tune,
limping
to the right of its locomotive leaving the station
and to the left of its fishing boat returning empty to port.
I followed it through fields of adverbials gone wild,
stumbling against monuments erected in memory of candy boxes
that winked like whores.
Sometimes suspenders in full bishop's robes or soup plates

Trembling, all trembling,
they stopped me with a question about the destiny of modern man.
I answered with a smile and a saw-like bite,
bit my tongue to light my way
, and resumed the pursuit amidst conversations in German
that emerged from the molehills where one could sense the hatching.

Immortals
, petrified brains barely breathing air

laden with moss
at the cliffs of mouths delicately painted in a kiss,
the shivering shadow of the Queen of Clubs rolled by

the waves of the moon, lost among the clouds
, from which it emerged, its two arms like telegraph wires

populated by swallows
that were playing out a scene from The Lady of the Camellias
with its savannah body that a fire closes on the horizon
led me by qualitative leaps of one ell each
, which forced me to split with the axe of my head
a thousand partitions,
sometimes of flour

where headless swans glided by

carrying an open umbrella,
sometimes veiled like widow's veils where nautiluses wandered,
frightened by the sounds of doors slamming in drafts of air,
all night long, barely pubescent,
to the beaches where chemists, in a line , spin as long as a

ball that doesn't spin
analyzed a sea pregnant with a shirt embroidered with wine-colored Caesar's mushrooms
swollen until they burst with enthusiasm
for the shadow of the queen of clubs

barely visible
in the seven suns that rang the hour of breakfast
by opening their corolla to their own light
flying away in the breeze that escaped from the flowering chestnut trees
pacing around a corkscrew.

Mexico. December 5, 1944.

Benjamin Péret