Andre Bréton “The Forest in the Axe”

Someone just died but I’m still alive and yet I don’t have a soul any more. I have nothing but a transparent body inside of which transparent doves throw themselves on a transparent dagger held by a transparent hand. I see effort in all its beauty, real effort that nothing can calculate, just before the last star makes its appearance. The body I live in like a hut and on lease detests the soul I had that’s floating in the distance. It’s time to be done with that famous duality for which I’ve taken so much blame. The time’s past when lightless and ringless eyes drew turbulence from the pools of color. There’s no more red or blue. The unanimous red-blue fades away in turn like a robin redbreast in the hedges of neglect. Someone just died— neither you nor me nor them exactly but all of us, save me who survives in many respects: I’m still cold, for instance. Enough of that. Bring fire! Fire! Or better yet some rocks so I can break them, or better yet some birds so I can follow them, or better yet some corsets so I can lace them tight around dead women’s waists, so they’ll come back to life and love me with their exhausting hair, their disheveled glances. Bring fire, so we don’t die for a glazed fig, bring fire so the Italian straw hat isn’t just a performance. Hello, lawn! Hello, rain! It’s me, the unreal breath of this garden. The black crown placed on my head is a cry of migratory crows because until now there were only those buried alive, not many for that matter, and now I’m the first of the aired-out dead. But I have a body not to be undone, to force the reptiles to admire me. Bloody hands, mistletoe eyes, mouth of dead leaves and glass (the dead leaves stir under the glass, they aren’t as red as one might think, when indifference lays bare its voracious methods), hands to pluck you, minuscule thyme of my dreams, rosemary of my extreme pallor. I don’t have a shadow anymore. Ah, my shadow, my dear shadow. I have to write a long letter to the shadow I’ve lost. I’ll start with My dear shadow. Shadow, my dearest. You see. There’s no more sun. There’s only one tropic out of two. There’s no more than one man out of a thousand. There’s only one woman out of the absence of thought that characterizes in pure black this damned epoch. That woman holds a bouquet of everlastings shaped like my blood.