The vertebral sphinx
The beautiful shade patient and curved goes about the cobblestones The Venetian windows open and close upon the square Where animals go at liberty followed by lights The wet streetlights hum framed by a cloud of blue eyes That cover the landscape up the hill from the city This morning a sunlight prow as you’re engulfed
by the superb songs exhaled in the old
style behind the curtains by naked female
lookouts While giant arums turn about their waists And the bloody manikin jumps on its three feet in the attic He’s coming they say stiffening their necks on
which the bounding of plaits sets
free glaciers just pink Which crack under the weight of a ray of light falling from shutters torn open He’s coming the wolf with teeth of glass Who eats the time in little round cans Who blows the too-penetrating perfumes of grasses Who smokes the little passage lights at evening in the turnips The columns of great apartments of marble and vetiver shout They shout they’re caught in those come-and-go movements that only would
animate hitherto certain colossal factory rooms Women motionless on turntables are going to see It’s daytime to the left but night completely
night to the right There are lopped branches still full of birds that pass
at top speed obscuring the hole in
the casement window White birds laying black eggs Where are those birds replaced now by stars edged with two rows of pearls A fish head very very long it’s not him any more From the fish head are born young ladies shaking a sieve And from the sieve hearts made of Prince Rupert’s drops He’s coming it’s the wolf with teeth of
glass Who flew very high over the wasteland above the houses With whetted plants all turned toward his eyes Of one sprightly to defy a bottle of foam turned upside down on the snow His jade claws in which he looks at himself while
flying His coat the color of sparks He’s the one who growls in the forges at
twilight-time and in the abandoned linen
mills He’s visible they touch him he advances with his balancing pole on the wire held
by the swallows The lookouts lean and lean at the windows From all their side of shade from all their side of
light The spool of day is drawn in little pulls from the direction of the paradise of
sand The pedals of night move without let |
André Breton