Ungilt blazon of my dreams

In this dream and yet I was almost awake

I thought I was on the sill of the great avalanche

Head of air tipped over beneath the weight of earth

My tracks were no more to be seen I was stifling

Last gasp first abyss definitive

I often breathe with difficulty and confine myself

Morally too especially when I’m alone

In this dream the time of life was reduced

To its simplest expression living and dying

My vertebrae my nerves my flesh

Trembled stammered with ignorance

And I lost my appearance

I had only saving myself by dreaming of animals

Stray mad dogs and immense night birds

Insect dry wood sticky clusters

And moving masses

More confused than rocks

More complicated than the forest beyond warmth

Where the sun slips by like a neuritis

Animals dungeons tunnels and labyrinths

On the ground and below ground forgotten

Animals at the breast of water that feeds them

In the flower of air that contains them

And animals decanted

Made of everything of nothing

Like the stars supposed

Without immediate surfaces without certain relations

Vertigo in fog I lay fallow

I figured as a mendicant

Nature and the elements

And my poor flesh my rich blood

And my bright wan feathers

My scales my wornout skin

My dumb voice my deaf heart

My fur my sure talons

My way and my wayfaring

My egg-laying and my disembowelment

My molting and my easeful death

My body absurd prison-pent

By the push and shove of loose-packed life

My function of being reproduced

Interminably

Inclined me ever a little further

Toward the most insentient deeps

I had only saving myself by thinking me a beast

Drift soar go to ground my childish shivers

My never-open eyes and newborn squeals

I do not refuse winter I’m still living

In autumn’s embrasure yet I pass

Unto the first chill weather like a leaf

Or indeed I die as born sans majesty

In a gurgle I am the new-blown bubble

And bursted in the sun I weave unknowing

The cloth the fur coat or the seamless jump

That only lets me endure for an instant

None have ever laughed or cried

I do not bog down nor smother

I do not burn nor drown

I am the indefinite number

At the heart of a page of figures

I am the son of my origins

I have the wrinkles the ravines of them

The thin blood the thick sap

The hazy summits the dark caves

The dew and the rust

I balance and I tip over

Like the strata of the ground

And I stretch out and I drag along

I burn and I freeze always

And I am insensible

For my senses engulf

The fall the rise

The flower and its root

The worm and its cocoon

The diamond and the mine

The eye and its horizon

I am neither heavy nor light

Nor solitary nor peopled

Nothing can separate

My hair from my arms

Nor my throat from its silence

Nor my illumination from my night

I am the crowd everywhere

Of deeps and heights

The grimace engraved or sculpted

The contortion of distance

The light closed or provoking

The mask put upon the nacre

The glebe dug out by the mole

The wave swollen by the shark

The breeze singing with birds

For nothing for everything to continue

In a hearth blazing extinguished

And rekindled with a wisp of straw

Animals are the hinge

Of the ailerons of motion

They know neither shipwrecks

Nor rubble they perpetuate

The long alliance of mud

With azure with stone

With waves with flame

Hard and soft as a mouth

I cannot rest

I sit in on the dead end game

In noise without color of music

There is no question of ruling

Nor of speech to trouble the insane order

Nor of raising the talus of my skull

Higher than the bush of day

Nor of permitting my breast

To trouble with its stem

The dregs of immobility

Animal I have nothing to take me elsewhere

I have no time at my disposal

My dust knows not the roads

Lightning vivifies my skeleton

And lightning renders me immobile

I am for a springtime the beating of a wing

I glide and pass on the sleek air

I am broken by the red-hot iron

Of sunup and twilight

The earth absorbs my reflection

I am not the object of any doubt

I contemplate nothing I watch

The proliferation of shade

Where I can be and abolish myself

Desire has reached me without reflection

The wall I strike knocks me down

And I fall and I stand up again

In the same essential abyss

In the same absence of images

Above below the elementary truth

The truth without its contrary

There is not one error in the world

The banal day and ordinary night

And attachments forever

With a fixed point life

Neither good nor ill

A life absorbing death

Without appearance of prestige

No halo for the lion

No gold talon for the eagle

And the hyenas have no shame

The fish know nothing of swimming

No bird flies

The hare runs to make a point

In the fixed glare of the owl

The spider makes only one web

Useful or useless a granary a ruin

I feel myself going away very low

Very high very near very far very hazy

And clear immense and smaller

Than the sky amassed for me

I imitate the most machinelike

Of gestures of a locality the earth

Moon and sun are without mystery

No more than the shoulders to the armpits

No more than the wind to my sails

Ungilt blazon of my dreams

I’ve made my mourning-clothes of myself

Laying me down like ash under flame

I’ve abdicated I can no more designate anything

Pointing out with a finger me so proud to be in the world

No I sleep and despite the power of night

I learn like a child that I am going to awaken

My sheets are the shroud of my dreams I live

And from the abyss I pass unto the blond light

And I breathe as a lover swoons

As a river weaves its way under a swallow

I know I’m not alone my fever rises

I hurl myself and rise and affirm my end

I am at last emerged from sleep I live.

Paul Eluard