Status Updates From Complete Poems

This Paris sky is purer than a winter sky crisp with cold.
I've never seen nights as starry and leafy as this spring's
Where the trees along the boulevards are like shadows from the sky,
Foliage in the rivers mixed with elephant ears,
Leaves of sycamores, heavy chestnuts.

Jeanne Jeanette my pet my pot my poot
My me mama poopoo Peru
Peepee cuckoo
Ding ding my dong
Sweet pea sweet flea sweet bumblebee
Chickadee beddy-bye
Little dove my love
Little cookie-nookie
Asleep.

“Color, color and more colors…Here’s Léger who grows like the sun in the tertiary epoch, who hardens, who fixes, The still life. The earth’s crust. The liquid. The steamy, Everything that grows dim. The cloudy geometry, The plumb line that retracts itself. Everything is teeming. The mind suddenly comes alive and gets dressed in its turn like the plants and animals
Painting becomes this great thing that moves

“To dare and make some noise. Everything is color, movement, explosion, light. Like flowers at the widows of the sun. Which melts in my mouth. I’m ripe. And I fall translucent in the street. Poetry is in play.”

“Listen to the violins of the limousines and the xylophones of the linotypes. The stenciler washes up in the washcloth of the sky. Everything is splashes of color. And the women’s hats going by are comets in the burning evening.
I read with pure delight the calico rolls
Calla lily rows
It’s raining light bulbs
One big halo
Depth
And In Front
The men are
Tall
Dark
Sad
And smoking, factory stacks”

“Send me the photograph of the forest of cork oaks that grow on the 400 locomotives abandoned by the French undertaking, The living dead, The palm tree grafted in the loading bucket of a crane overgrown with orchids, The pump pipes clogged with a colony of Iguanas.


Earth, Seas, Oceans, Skies
I’m homesick
I follow every face and I’m scared of mailboxes
The cities are wombs
I don’t follow the roads anymore”

“If I were a painter I would splash lots of red and yellow over the end of this trip, because I think we were all slightly crazy, As we came closer to Mongolia, Which roared like a Forest Fire, I saw the silent trains, the black trains returning from the Far East and going by like phantoms , And my eyes like tail lights, are still trailing along behind those trains , In the direction of Port Arthur.”

Lamento decir que los poemas que integran esta recopilación no están a la altura de la fascinante y trapalosa biografía de su autor. Lo bueno es que, por una vez, no hay que abusar del diccionario para leer poesía en su lengua original.