BLAISE CENDRARSSo many associations images I can’t get into my poem
Because I’m still such a really bad poet
Because the universe rushes over me
And I didn’t bother to insure myself against train wreck
Because I don’t know how to take it all the way
And I’m scared.
I’m scared
I don’t know how to take it all the way.
Like my friend Chagall I could do a series of irrational paintings
But I didn’t take notes
‘‘Forgive my ignorance
Pardon my forgetting how to play the ancient game of Verse’’
As Guillaume Apollinaire says
If you want to know anything about the war read Kuropotkin’s Memoirs
Or the Japanese newspapers with their ghastly illustrations
But why compile a bibliography
I give up
Bounce back into my leaping memory...
...O Paris
Great warm hearth with the intersecting embers of your streets and your old
houses leaning over them for warmth
Like grandmothers
And here are posters in red in green all colors like my past in a word yellow
Yellow the proud color of the novels of France
In big cities I like to rub elbows with the buses as they go by
Those of the Saint-Germain—Montmartre line that carry me to the assault of
the Butte
The motors bellow like golden bulls
The cows of dusk graze on Sacré-Coeur
O Paris
Main station where desires arrive at the crossroads of restlessness
Now only the paint store has a little light on its door
The International Pullman and Great European Express Company has sent me
its brochure
It’s the most beautiful church in the world
I have friends who surround me like guardrails
They’re afraid that when I leave I’ll never come back
All the women I’ve ever known appear around me on the horizon