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

Benjamin PERET (1889.1959)

Signed autograph manuscript.

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 on the banks of the bitumen rivers
I saw the shadow of a wooden sun whistling a tune from an untapped quarry
while limping
to the right of its locomotive leaving the station
and to the left of its fishing boat returning empty at the port
I followed her through the cultures of adverbs returned to the wild state
stumbling against monuments erected in memory of the candy boxes
which winked like whores
Sometimes suspenders in full bishop's dress or plates with soup

trembling all trembling
stopped me with a question relating to the destiny of modern man
I answered it with a smile and with a flick of the saw
bit my tongue to light my way
and resumed the pursuit in the middle of conversations in German
who came out of the molehills where one could guess the hatching

immortals
Petrified brains and barely breathing air

loaded with moss
to the cliffs of mouths delicately painted in kiss
the shivering shadow of the lady of clubs rolled by

the waves of the moon lost between the clouds
from which it emerged its two arms made of telegraph wires

populated by swallows
who played a scene from the Lady of the Camellias
with her savannah body that a fire closes on the horizon
took me by qualitative leaps of a yard each

thousand
with the ax of my head partitions sometimes made of flour

where headless swans glided

carrying an open umbrella,
sometimes widow's veils where nautiluses walked
, frightened by the sound of doors slamming in drafts,
all through the barely pubescent night,
to the beaches where chemists lined up in a line as long as a

ball that does not turn
analyzed a sea pregnant with a shirt embroidered with vinous orongs
swollen to the point of bursting with enthusiasm
for the shadow of the lady of clubs

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

Mexico. December 5, 1944.

Benjamin Peret