HISTORY  ALWAYS WANTS

TO REFER ME TO YOU,

ANDRE BRETON

By / Abdul Kadir El Janabi

Traduit de l’anglais par Alain Joubert

These lines are decicated to

the bandits of the windy city

André Breton,

windows are open

and your becoming is eyed by their curtains.

From under the blanket of unapplied thought

I see you holding a dream

curved between your hands

a phoenix smeared with blond haze rises up

and gives you a sultry look

for you are handsome like “a militant swan”

whose tongue is wading into my enemies’mouths.

Indications of flames you smile

foresights which permit

civilizations to melt into celestial bodies

streets to pile in mobile corpses

and flowers to bleed the four corners of the air.

There is no bird curious to fornicate a wood

the old-timers are of no consequence.

To furbish their sobered call

they kneaded the tongues of a horizontal insomnia

they are priest-ridden dogs

the needle of death is their phallic symbol

and I should say

you have to go down the paper

loaded with a growling anguish

to be hurled on the bedrooms of their visions.

But you come to me never with what they know.

For I see you a woodfire butterfly

cleaving cascades of knowledge

a blazing running water

whose depth is a shape of elsewhere

an epicurean domain engraved on the stone of flesh

with fingers comparable

to the interior convulsions of uneven sounds

then I se you “touching only the heart of things”

and mossy vibration

as a limpid nightfall

tiptoes in my wide-awake sleep.

You “hold the thread”

and I still see a curious childhood

stronger than death

weaving invisible sands.

Implanted in the shores of sleepless mirrors

where the gesture of insurrections

sings its reincarnation.

The poem is a being

and History – the hive of ironies – is in no hurry

to see that a windy city

is reserved

for your springs.