"Messenger of Tyranny" (Pierre Reverdy)

March 22, 2008

[photo by Gavatron]

“Messenger of Tyranny”

He spits sparks on the night, cinders, love, lightning, broken wings, hate, stars and gold coins which hasten away. He sighs of remorse on the night. At the breath of silence, he grapples with man and knocks him down. He rams the silence down his throat. And, whether in the fermented cities, the red cities where a deep well sleeps at every intersection, where the passerby leave a luminous trail in the shadow; whether in open country sparsely furnished with vague inhabitants; whether in hopeless deserts no one will ever enter, he sows desire in the air and in people’s minds. Men are thrown into a sea of a single night’s sleep. At each half-open door, at each windowpane where the gleam shivers one can overhear what he says, one can hear the dull blows of anguish.

Everything is clenched in the hand that never pardons. Everything is said and everything is set down under the same heading. One day you close your eye to the light of night. All these lamps in the evening. All these lost paths that wind at dawn. All these falling fires from the woods of the heavens. And all the dead dreams that still flicker. Everything will be covered by leaves of lead, by the copper-colored laughs of the days that time incubates. Then the eternal fire will burn your past, your past torn by a sacrilegious hand. Whereupon the insane ravens dismember the gray sky. The black, skipped pages in the book become dog-eared; the book wherein the chords of your life are inscribed. Nothing is left but the black saliva, streaming in the night, and hate, love, gold, the desire for gold, the freedom without wings, the biting against the chains. And, in the white of the eye, of the heart, on the reverse side of truth, force, the force that weighs down and kills, the whole force.

– Pierre Reverdy (translated by John Ashbery)
from Pierre Reverdy: Selected Poems

Tags: pierre reverdy, poetry, prose poetry, readngs