| Broken Line | |||||||||||||
| André Breton | |||||||||||||
| for Raymond Roussel | |||||||||||||
| We dry bread and water of the sky’s prisons
We love’s cobblestones all interrupted signals Who personify the graces of this poem Nothing explains us beyond death At that hour when night slips on its polished ankle boots to go out We take time as it comes Like a wall adjoining those of our prisons Spiders bring the boats into anchorage There’s only touch there’s nothing to see Later you learn who we are Our labors are still well protected But it’s dawn on the last shore the weather grows worse Soon we’ll carry our burdensome luxury elsewhere We’ll carry the plague’s luxury elsewhere We a bit of hoarfrost on human firewood And that’s all The brandy dresses wounds in a cellar through an air-vent from which is seen a road lined with big empty patiences Don’t ask where you are We dry bread and water of the sky’s prisons The card game in the starlight We scarcely lift an edge of the veil The mender of crockey works on a ladder He seems young despite the concession We wear yellow in mourning for him The treaty hasn’t yet been signed The sisters of charity provoke Flights on the horizon Do we perhaps palliate good and evil at the same time It’s thus that the will of dreams is carried out People who are able Our rigors are lost in the regret of what crumbles We are the leading men of the most terrible seduction The crook of junkman Morning on blossoming rags Casts us to the fury of treasures that are long in the tooth Add nothing to the shame of your own pardon It’s enough to take up arms for a bottomless end Your eyes with ridiculous tears that relieve us The belly of words is golden this evening and nothing’s in vain any more |
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