Poèmes by Raphael Simons
Wheel
a green wall speckled with red
opens onto a street where the sun hangs by a wire from the branch of a dead tree,
where, transfixed,
she stares into to the mirror
at three faces on a road
on a ledge of a valley where her memory took flight,
her dark green face fragrant with flowers
blaring from her nose,
her arms spinning and turning
up and down,
while a red rock in slabs assumes numerous attitudes
as it watches her in the black air of violets
announcing the dawn with torn wings
plummeting about the man who hangs in mid-air
with no answer.
he plucks at her, striated in slats,
as if on a harp
that makes the sound of one walking on gravel
in a bird.
Game of Cards
an old man with eagle’s claw feet
and torn trousers that were spun in the attic
throws down the eight of diamonds eight times
in the papers
where a girl drying her hair with a blunderbuss
blew off her heads
one up; two down;
four up; eight down;
sixteen up; thirty-two down the sandbar growing by leaps and bounds,
while in the papers the joker took them by surprise.
not me, said the old man to a thin gray woman, both very tall,
throwing gray chickens at the nails
protruding from the weather beaten wall of the gray barn
where a snake long past recalling old dreams in trees
walked through the brambles cutting into its feet singing,
I won’t be alone in this,
it’s eye peering all the while through the swirling dark clouds
that lay on a wooden board in the rain of the red joker
staring at the fat woman in the sky-blue duster
winding her way like a huge blacksnake
through terminal after terminal in the train station
hunting her victims in one bake shop after another
in anapests
while her victims hunted her in dactyls
all the way to 9th street and 7th avenue
where a pencil of a man ran downstairs
to the place of infinite impossibilities.
sitting at a table,
he slaps down the nine of diamonds
and hammers it with a nail smack dab in the middle
just like the beauregardens of the nightstick
of socks hanging from the clothes lines
fluttering in the wind, each one a severed head
with eyes listening in the clouds to the fragrance of
an ice field.
Images is a book of surrealist poetry. It has 43 poems. They were written roughly between 2017 and 2022. Although they are in a unique style, poets and writers who influenced Raphael Simons, include Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Benjamin Peret, and Leonora Carrington.
By La Belle Inutile Editions
SULFUR 