from The Magnetic Fields

Let’s Stop Moving

The soil crushed by power saws and couch-grass rock drills would set us a good example; a drunken magpie leaps one by one over the furrows crimson from blight. The twilight plowing has come to an end and on the church square, milk-white engagement bouquets blossom between paving stones. The sad flutter of old pennants, the notary’s and farrier’s share of responsibility, evaporate in the fizzy lemonade morning. A squat farmer, his white vest flecked with spots of rust, drinks to the lovers’ health. Clothes adorable as dahlias. In the paddock, grasses await the arrival of the yellow-and-blue thresher.

*

The nocturnes of dead musicians lull cities forever asleep. On the steps of a hotel on Thirtieth Avenue a baby and a puppy frolic. No, you cannot form an idea of aquatic customs by looking through your tears, that is not true. Space, smooth as a woman’s hand, belongs to speed. From day to day, we come closer to scrublands and markets. The depth of Les Halles is less than that of the Pacific Ocean. Thick, well-thumbed books turn into abandoned shells full of earth. On the agate ramps and the moving walkways we notice little chalk stars that have never signified anything but the nostalgia of upholsterers and sailors. Antiquity is a fountain pearly in spots, but the throats of sphinxes have turned green. The slanting hail of prisons, that wonderful bunch of keys, keeps us from seeing the sun. A female dancer on the tightrope is our fickle patience.

Sheltered from posthumous insults, we miss the love of all women; we reread the barometric clues at every garden entrance.

HOTELS

At midnight, you will again see the open windows and closed doors. Music emerges from all the holes where you can see microbes and capitalized lines of poetry dying like worms. But further on, still further on, there are more cries so blue you die of excitement. Everything is blue here. The avenues and grand boulevards are deserted. The night is overcrowded with stars and the song of those folk rises to the sky just as the sea goes off in search of the moon, a happiness so heavy and so undisappointing for the delicate souls of the waves. The beaches are full of those bodiless eyes you meet near dunes and remote meadows red from the blood of flowery flocks. Corpses of beloved days, crater of emotions and red, red drunkennesses, but where the heart beats like a thin bell turned pale by external suns. The main door lets orange smoke seep through like the mushrooms we used to love; the wood is quite close and rotund women run here and there gathering ephemeral leaves brought back to life; they are birds of every color that sing better than the wind. Quadrilateral where you suffocate forever, but when you leave you know the hunter is there, with all those dogs, all those eyes, and no one can forget the fucking church clock that hits you on the head like a rock that disintegrates without a cry.

*

My two crossed hands represent the celestial vault and my head is a grotesque, bald goose.

*

The operator, in order to photograph certain plants, is obliged to hold a fan and must pretend to be dancing.

*

The spectacle of alpine variations, the leitmotif of the chamois, the luxurious hotel, and the lace crevasses delight people of a mediocre sort.

*

Street singers, the world is big and you will never succeed.

*

You feel it’s there, the monstrous barometer, the gaslight lyre of waiting rooms.

TRAINS

The embankments crack under the heat of the swift railcars and the soot fiery from all the steam that flows far over the trees. No one knows what this smell is of wolves dead from hunger that seizes you by the throat in third-class cars. Courage for these cries of hysterical locomotives and for these groans of tortured wheels. Outside, trees drunk from so many gazes have the monstrous vertigo of crowds when a plane leaves on an eternal voyage. At every signal, a huge animal stays hidden and looks through a single eye at that great noisy lizard gliding over streams of diamonds and over the pebbles of aerial mines.

*

The lake we cross with an umbrella, the unsettling iridescence of the Earth—all that makes us want to disappear. A man walks while cracking hazelnuts and at times folds in on himself like a fan. He heads for the lounge where the ferrets have preceded him. If he arrives for the closing, he’ll see underwater gates opening a way for the honeysuckle boat. Tomorrow or the next day, he’ll go find his wife who’s waiting for him while stitching together lights and threading tears. The worm-filled apples in the ditch and the echo of the Caspian Sea try with all their might to keep their emerald powder. His hands are sorrowful as a snail’s horns; he claps his hands in front of him. Everything illumines him with its lukewarm reasoning like the body of a dying bird; he listens to the contractions of stones on the road, and they devour each other like fish. The glassmaker’s spittle gives him starry thrills. He tries to find out what he has become since his death.

*

The world that writes 365 in Arabic numerals has learned to multiply it by a two-digit number.

*

Under my arm, on the inner part, I have a sinister mark, a blue M that threatens me.

*

My eyes belong only to me and I pin them to my cheeks, so cool and so ravaged by the wind of your words.

*

There’s nothing left to be desired in this whitewashed nursery where the ermine of the most distant ceremonies strolls amiably with the mimosa otter, the sweet wife of maternal care.

*

Love deep in the woods gleams like a great candle.

*

HONEYMOON

From what do mutual attractions stem? There are some jealousies more touching than others. The rivalry between a woman and a book: I willingly walk through that darkness. The fingertip on the temple is not the barrel of a gun. I think we were listening to each other thinking, but the instinctive “About nothing” which is the proudest of our refusals did not have to be uttered in all that honeymoon trip. Less high than the stars there is nothing to stare at. In any train, it is dangerous to lean out of the door. The stations were clearly distributed over a gulf. The sea which to the human eye is never as beautiful as the sky didn’t leave us. In the depths of our eyes were lost nice calculations aimed at the future like those of prison walls.

*

There’s no way to be bored: that would be at the cost of caresses and soon we won’t be there anymore.

*

The ring of heroism and money still soars, the oldest-model plane, over the province.

*

My youth in an armchair on casters with birds on the handle of the future.

*

God the Father’s will to greatness does not go beyond 4,810 meters in France, altitude measured above sea level.

*

Sermon of waves, multicolored doge, emphatic sun, avenger of girls who dance crowned with fiery fishes


FACTORY

The great legend of railroads and reservoirs, the fatigue of draft animals, find their way to the hearts of certain men. Here are some that have grown acquainted with drive belts: regular breathing is over for them. Accidents at work — no one  will contradict me—are more beautiful than marriages of convenience. Sometimes, though, the boss’s daughter crosses the yard. It’s easier to get rid of an oil stain than a dead leaf; at least your hand doesn’t tremble. Equidistant from production and design workshops the prism of surveillance plays spitefully with the hiring star.

*

What are we waiting for? A woman? Two trees? Three flags?
What are we waiting for? Nothing.

*

The pointer pigeons that get travelers murdered carry in their beaks a letter with a blue border.

*

Between multiple splendors of anger, I watch a door slam
like the fence around a flower or a schoolboy’s eraser.

*

The sewer workers of paradise are familiar with those white
rats that scurry under God’s throne.

*

On All Souls’ Day, I was born in a dreadful meadow amongst
shells and paper kites.

*

Suns of astral seas, the torpedoing of black beams of light
and of big longboats disquiet hallway and gazes of capers,
muscatels, maraschinos! Darling, where is that flying squirrel,
that little nest where I was born? My friend’s horse is a
purebred split in two; he runs through fields and snorts flames
through his powdery nostrils. His gallop is stronger than
night, more powerful than the ethereal vapor of love. When will
we be able to squeeze between our legs that mammalian monster,
that Tibetan goat that climbs the Guari-shankar to the sound of
metal flutes sweeter than your cry, O despairing shepherd. We
will see bloody blotting paper and pastel-blue faces. They will
be dressed in the green of lights and in woven leaves. Their
eyes are a pale grey that makes men tremble and women miscarry.

*

Temptation to order a new cocktail: for instance a
demolition with plane tree.

*

Present from the very beginning, the white herring polishes
the counter and it causes a condensation of poetry that starves.

*

Today or some other day they’ll forget to light the
streetlamps.

*

Do not disturb that genius planter of white roots, my
underground nerve endings.

*

On each of these pages you will find this simple word:
Adieu.

         The carpenter’s birds near the Pole
         midnight
         passengers
         severely dressed
         the young woman
         has around her neck
         a little flame of alcohol
         desire desire

         One way to make a fortune
         with lace inspiration
         to be grave
         the serpentines
         of music
         hands
         in front of a clockwork mechanism
         like the sky

         Take up again the old heroic song
         laugh in other words
         from the rectangular ad
         to mineral water and flowers
         hold on
         the time is coming when tenderness
         passes
         among honorable society