Five Poems from Paul Dermée
translated from the French by Kim Lohse
* Paul Dermée first published these poems for a Parisian literary magazine called Nord-
Sud Revue Littéraire between the years 1917 and 1918. The magazine was edited by a
number of very clever early Surrealist, Dadaist and Futurist leaders. In fact, the
magazine’s short publication was an incubator for those movements. Paul Dermée was
the head of the design team and responsible for much of the magazine’s layout. He later
identified as a Dadaist and designed many famous posters for Dadaist shows in Paris.
Dermée continued to work in design and advertising for the rest of his life.
** go HERE to read the French
I n C e l l
Broken windowpane
bloody fist
A veil
gloves removed
damp breath
and bloodless lips praying
The remnants cast in mud
just to the nails
They will speak…
But you and your sliced throat
The eye notices someone in the corner
That singular machine
made to take
my fingerprints on this paper
Smashed glass
and the Langres knife
This cold morning sharper than my sweat
O feverish hands of white night
Turned out drawers
What of the strange things
one accumulated through the years
Midnight will shine for the abandoned heart
and for its tragic eyelids
Curtains one owns
more than the memory
Felted peace
to whir with the sun
the vagrant
drink with the lights
the bars of Saint-Severin
To finally taste the inexhaustible lapse of memory…
But these bloody prints betray it
F e a s t
They have machine gunned Heaven into a screen of holes!
It will not take long to fall.
Groping around in the darkness
Someone chases himself, a blade with teeth.
The insane are sniffing, hot breath.
Where should I hide, in which chapel?
Every encounter wants someone dead,
The corks jump like brains
And the orgy is drunk on blood.
—Duck, quickly.
Too late!!
My son is eternal like a corpse
He is beautiful like a hero!
And this carnage has continued for a hundred days.
I put my hand in all the wounds
There are so many deaths I have forgotten the number.
All the nurses have collapsed from the pain
And there is not enough wood in the world
to make all the caskets.
In the sky over the Anthropophagous Islands
God erected the Southern Cross
For all the dead without tombs.
Undoubtedly, we go to see some vast
and crucial constellation as it’s born!
Our dead are not buried.
Nor the enemies! Their mouths bite the earth!
My friends come… with weapons behind their backs.
Live, go!
New corpses!
The last girl dies on the body of the last poet.
One more cry beneath the stars.
Now, what I did was necessary!
But I never want anyone to see all this carnage!
I will go up on the barn roof
to plug holes in the sky with my fingers.
And the first who approaches, I’ll cut him down.
(A l f r e d) S i s l e y
The streetcars sing on their rails
Morning at the riverbanks
Your pipe your shoes in hock your sweater
Flaunts your innocence
The sky rings like a clock
Youth passes tenderly
Honey pours out of all my wounds
Your shame
Silvered Birch
Small chains at my wrists
azur
Go create the world however you desire
T w o P o e m s
I
Coffee mill
the wind failing
Your nostrils flare
A slow rhythm
Romance
The sky turns
A wheel
These letters under the door
A new life
Remote war
And my glass smokes
A clarity crowns the universe
II
These apples
and the whiteness of the fruit dish
The knife point made a wound
Your raised linen
the center appears
The moon
Of the lips
My nocturnal desire is revived
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