Surrealist Love Poems

 

Three poems from
Surrealist
Love Poems

edited by Mary Ann Caws

I love
Jacques-Bernard Brunius (1944)

I love sliding I love upsetting everything
I love coming in I love sighing
I love taming the furtive manes of hair
I love hot I love tenuous
I love supple I love infernal
I love sugared but elastic the curtain of springs turning to glass
I love pearl I love skin
I love tempest I love pupil
I love benevolent seal long-distance swimmer
I love oval I love struggling
I love shining I love breaking
I love the smoking spark silk vanilla mouth to mouth
I love blue I love known—knowing
I love lazy I love spherical
I love liquid beating drum sun if it wavers
I love to the left I love in the fire
I love because I love at the edges
I love forever many times Just one
I love freely I love especially
I love separately I love scandalously
I love similarly obscurely uniquely
                                        HOPINGLY
I love           I shall love

 

The shape of your eyes
Paul Eluard (1926)

The shape of your eyes goes round my heart,
A round of dance and sweetness.
Halo of time, cradle nightly and sure
No longer do I know what I've lived,
Your eyes have not always seen me.

Leaves of day and moss of dew,
Reeds of wind and scented smiles,
Wings lighting up the world,
Boats laden with sky and sea,
Hunters of sound and sources of colour,

Scents the echoes of a covey of dawns
Recumbent on the straw of stars,
As the day depends on innocence
The world relies on your pure sight
All my blood courses in its glance.

 

I want to sleep with you
Joyce Mansour (1955)

I want to sleep with you side by side
Our hair intertwined
Our sexes joined
With your mouth for a pillow.
I want to sleep with you back to back
With no breath to part us
No words to distract us
No eyes to lie to us
With no clothes on.
To sleep with you breast to breast
Tense and sweating
Shining with a thousand quivers
Consumed by ecstatic mad inertia
Stretched out on your shadow
Hammered by your tongue
To die in a rabbit's rotting teeth
Happy.

 

 

Copyright notice: Excerpted from Surrealist Love Poems edited by Mary Ann Caws, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2002 by Tate Publishing. All rights reserved.


Mary Ann Caws, editor
Surrealist Love Poems
©2002, 120 pages, 14 halftones
Paper $15.00 ISBN: 0-226-09872-9

For information on purchasing the book—from bookstores or here online—please go to the webpage for Surrealist Love Poems.


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