to raise your foot off the scaffold
to run up and down the vertical columns
to veil the pot of liver pâté in crepe
to find a root in its coffee cup
to rear three flies in Westminster Abbey
to send a carrot through the mail
to draw up the family tree of a gas lamp
to lose your way in the pump's tube
just look at the pleasures reserved for a speck of dust that makes perfect machines
go on the blink
machines that behave like fish
Guns magnetized by umbelliferous plants
suspended from the closed blinds
their barrels thrust between the slats
threatened the shadows' manifold snakes
the ones that coil around bicycles
and the ones that float at evening like hands outstretched from one riverbank
to the other
But if a riverbank loses its way in the course of this journey
all's lost as if in a diving-bell
The tipsy stroke
The sunbeam that passed through a prism didn't recognize itself when it came out
There was a sound of a choked clock
followed by the muffled sound of a bundle of linen falling into a well
And that was all
But a wheel replaced the tipsy hand with the riverbank