The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

ANDRÉ BRETON

It used to be that my room’s furnishings were solidly

fixed to the walls and I had to be strapped down to write:

I’m a good sailor

we belong to a sort of sentimental Touring Club

A CHATEAU INSTEAD OF A HEAD

that’s the Charity Bazaar too

Delightful games for all ages;

Poetic games, etc.

I hold Paris like — to unveil the future for you — your open hand

with a waist tightly bound.

—mary ann caws

Vigilance

In Paris, the Tour Saint-Jacques
Swaying like a sunflower
Sometimes against the Seine its shadow moves among the
tugboats
Just then on tiptoe in my sleep
I move towards the room where I am lying
And set it afire
Nothing remains of the consent I had to give
The furniture makes way for beasts looking at me like
brothers
Lions whose manes consume the chairs
Sharks’ white bellies absorb the sheets’ last
quiver
At the hour of love and blue eyelids
I see myself burning now I see that solemn hiding place of
nothings
Which was once my body
Probed by the patient beaks of firebirds
When all is finished I enter the ark unseen
Taking no need of life’s passersby whose shu∆ing steps are heard
far o√
I see the ridges of the sun
Through the hawthorn of the rain
I hear human linen tearing like a great
leaf