A little bit of effortless surrealist poetry

Le rite et le parc hagard …
– Vincent Bounoure

No, don’t want it. Not that park today, not the trash around the rubbish bins.

And your haggard back. The way you walk with that cane in your hand, bent forward, but as if you’d swallowed it, as if it had gotten into you at a cant and gotten you into one.

You state, and it is an insufferable expletion: “Janine, today’s a great day. The sky is grey, the birds are squawking, we are depressed.”

No, don’t want it. I fear the birds. They are not just pigeons and crows. I fear their claws, that crimson redness of pigeon claws. And I dreamed of shiny crow eyes last night. Not really, but thought I should mention it for reinforcement.

“Janine, tu t’obstines.”

All right, so I’m being obstinate. But it’s a rite. I’m not your granddaughter for nothing.

The rite of the haggard park with its sticky Baudelairesque plants that attach themselves to you like leaches if you don’t watch out.

You are, in fact, one of them, haggard granddad.

You’re rooted in that park, you stand for it, you want to expand it, make it the whole world, that park with its discards and mercenary pigeons.

But I believe the sky is different, there’s an outside of it. Not haggard. Pink. Where playful butterflies surround me.

– James Steerforth (© 2007)

Addenda
This piece was the indirect outcome of a. having corresponded with Belgian poet Philippe Cantraine recently, so that b. I felt like I needed to look at something he’d written, which c. I did half an hour ago at Maison de la poésie. d. It sounded surreal, which e. created an urge in me to write something in the surrealist vein, but, of course, I could not do that directly but had to f. obtain inspiration from another source, which I found g. in La Poésie Surréaliste, which I opened h. to the page which started with the line by Vincent Bounoure (1928-1996), and that i. set me in motion.

However, to add a few more seemingly not so cohesive facets, I should perhaps also mention that the granddad is modeled after Thatha in the Amulya Malladi novel I finished this morning and from which I quoted recently. So that it could be said that Janine might be some sort of Frenchisized metamorphosis of the Priya character in the Indian novel, whose grandpa Thatha is.

But then again metamorphosis is something the surrealists loved to play with.

Advertisement