Place Blanche

This morning places nothing in my path but the trinkets of death.
They are futile objects,
faded photographs,
empty flagons,
shells gathered at the sea,
a mirror that reflected the serenity, purity, calm gaiety, brightness that
   ineluctable darkness swallowed up.
I am voodooed by these objects
belonging to people who died long ago.
Gestures separated from these objects
like dull vapors,
like wreaths of breath.
They blur through me.
The bells strike years in every minute.
Each minute produces an effusion of memories
that it seems the size of a year.
These minutes are like dark baskets overflowing with black fruit.
Years pass by with ant-fans on their heads.
Maintaining its form, each ant-fan swarms in itself and at the same
   time moves intensely
to fan a sterile life, a gray desert.
A reddish callous substance swarms in those chimeras, in those years
and feels like the teeming of mankind on the earth.
Years pass by with a vegetable mouth and genius-fins.
These years are green lairs.
They shelter the fairies during their moulting time.
In those years I was writing my first poems,
and my genius-fins appeared regardless of my neighbors.
Years pass by and drive out small years.
They slaughter them ruthlessly
and thus destroy their own seed.
And one more system of rigidity is bequeathed to the world.
Will it point out the road to ineffable dreams?

I am part of a flock of poets and painters
submissive and obedient to their shepherd.
Like marionettes these poets, these painters consent, nod their heads,
laugh disdainfully at anything that was white until now
and has just been declared black.
The shepherd lights up.
The shepherd lights up brighter and brighter.
He loses his human form,
but I can hear his voice speaking about art.
It speaks strangely about miscellania.
The light of art speaks of piquant suicide.
I know I'm dreaming.
I close my eyes and find myself on Place Blanche.
The water on the square is choppy.
Enormous waves leap against the houses
and rip out the lips
that the birds have hung at the windows.
I open my eyes.
White manes fly off.
Dreamers holding one another's hands like blind men
cross the square.
The wind caresses the tame plants.
I close my eyes.
It's nighttime.
Suddenly I awake in the night.
The birds are singing.
It's daytime.
Liquid mountains float through the air.
I open my eyes and fall asleep standing in Place Blanche.
The umbel of the stars covers itself with lips.

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