Hunt them all

To Benjamin Péret

At the heart of the Indian territory of Oklahoma

A seated man

Whose eyes are like a cat that turns about a pot of quitch

A surrounded man

And through his window

The council of deceitful inflexible divinities

Who rise each morning in greater numbers from the fog

Weary fairies

Virgins in the Spanish manner inscribed within a strict

isosceles triangle

Fixed comets with hair the wind fades

Petroleum like Eleanor’s hair

Boils beneath the continents

And in its transparent voice

As far as the eye can see there are armies that watch

themselves

There are songs that travel under the wing of a lamp

There is also the hope of going so fast

That in your eyes

Blend on the edge of the window leaves and lights

At the crossroads of nomadic routes

A man

Around him they have traced a circle

As around a hen

Buried alive in the reflection of blue sheets

Piled up infinitely in his cupboard

A man with a stitched head

In the sundown’s depths

And whose hands are boxfish

This country resembles an immense nightclub

With its women come from the ends of the earth

Whose shoulders roll pebbles from all the seas

The American agencies don’t forget to provide for these

Indian chiefs

On the lands whereon they’ve sunk wells

And who only remain free to move house

Within the limits imposed by the war treaty

Useless wealth

The thousand eyelids of the sleeping water

The curator passes each month

He places his gibus on the bed covered with a veil of

arrows

And from his sealskin valise

Pours out the latest manufacturers’ catalogues

Winged with the hand that opened and shut them when

we were children

One time only one time

It was an automobile catalogue

Presenting the bridal car

With a speader that stretched a dozen meters

For the train

The great painter’s car

Cut in a prism

The governor’s car

Just like a sea urchin whose every spine is a

flamethrower

There was especially

A fast black car

Crowned with mother-of-pearl eagles

And hollowed out on all its facets with foliation of

drawing room fireplaces

As by waves

A carriage only being able to be moved by lightning

Like the one in which roams with eyes closed

Princess Acantha

A great wheelbarrow all in gray slugs

And in tongues of fire like that which appeared at the

fatal hours in the garden of the Saint-Jacques

tower

A fast fish caught in seaweed and multiplying the

blows of its tail

A large car of pomp and mourning

For the last promenade of the holy emperor to come

Of fantasy

That would outmode all of life

The finger designated without hesitation the frozen

image

And since then

The man with the Triton crest

At his pearl-covered steering wheel

Each evening comes to tuck up the bed of the

goddess of maize

I keep for poetic history

The name of this dispossessed chief who is a little

our own

Of this man alone engaged in the great circuit

Of this man superbly rusty in a new machine

That puts the wind at half-mast

He is called

He bears the flamboyant name of Hunt them all

To life to death hunt at once the two hares

Hunt your fortune which is a flight of holiday bells

and alarm bells

Hunt the creatures of your dreams which faint on the

wheel in their white petticoats

Hunt the fingerless ring

Hunt the head of the avalanche

André Breton