On the shores of Texas
Between Mobile and Galveston there is
A great garden filled with roses
There is also a villa
Which is one huge rose
A woman passes often
In the garden alone
And when I pace the road edged with lime trees
Our eyes meet
As she is a Mennonite
Her rose trees and her garments have no buttons
My jacket’s missing two
That lady and I observe almost the same rite
Guillaume Apollinaire
The meadow is deadly though fair in autumn
Cows grazing there
Slowly are poisoned
There crocuses color of eye-ring color of lilac
Bloom your eyes like these flowers
Like their rings and like autumn are violet
My life from your eyes slowly takes poison
School children noisily come
Wearing jackets playing harmonicas
To pick crocuses that are like mothers
Daughters of their daughters they are color of your eyelids
Fluttering like flowers in a crazy wind
Softly the cowherd sings
While cows slow and lowing abandon
Forever meadows so evilly flowered by autumn
Guillaume Apollinaire
Sirens, do I not share your discontent
When in the night you far and wide lament?
Sea, I’m like you: machined cries fill my ears.
My vessels sing. They call themselves the years.
Guillaume Apollinaire
we know nothing
we knew nothing of grief
the bitter season of cold
digs long furrows in our muscles
he would have preferred the joy of victory
wise under calm sorrows caged
unable to do anything at all
if snow fell upward
if the sun rose to meet us during the night
to warm us
and trees hung with their crown upside down
—unique teardrop—
if birds were here with us to contemplate themselves
in the tranquil lake above our heads
WE COULD UNDERSTAND
death would be a beautiful long voyage
and an unlimited vacation from the flesh of structures and of bones.
Tristan Tzara
The yellow fades from red to green
When aras sing in their native forest
Pihis giblets
There is a poem to be done on the bird with only one wing
We will send it by telephone
Giant traumatism
It makes one’s eyes run
There is one pretty one among all the young girls from Turin
The unfortunate young man blows his nose in his white necktie
You will lift the curtain
And now look at the window opening
Spiders when hands were weaving light
Beauty paleness unfathomable violet tints
We shall try in vain to take our ease
They start at midnight
When one has time one has liberty
Periwinkles Turbot multiple Suns and the Sea-urchin of the setting sun
An old pair of yellow shoes in front of the window
Towers
Towers are streets
Wells
Wells are market places
Wells
Hollow trees which shelter vagabond Capresses
The Octoroons sing songs of dying
To their chestnut-colored wives
And the goose honk honk trumpets in the north
When racoon hunters
Scrape their pelts
Gleaming diamond
Vancouver
Where the train white with snow and fires of the night flees the winter
O Paris
The yellow fades from red to green
Paris Vancouver Hyères Maintenon New York and the Antilles
The window opens like an orange
Lovely fruit of light
Guillaume Apollinaire
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