When that love was done with, I was left
like a bird on a branch. I was no longer
of any use for anything. Nevertheless I
observed that the patches of oil on the water reflected
my image and I noticed that the Pont au Change,
which has the bird market next to it, was becoming
more and more curved.
And that is how, one fine day, I crossed over
forever to the other side of the rainbow by dint of
watching iridescent birds. Now I have nothing to do
with the ground. No more than any other bird, I say,
do I need any more to demean myself on the ground,
to put in a winged appearance on the ground. I
refuse to sing along with you the lurid ditty: "We die
for the little birds, give a feast to your little birds."
The gaudy colours of the rainshower prattle
parrot. They coddle the wind which hatches out with
seeds in its eyes. The double eyelid of the sun rises
and falls on life. The birds' feet on the windowpane of
the sky are what I used to call stars. The earth itself,
whose motion seems so inexplicable as long as one
remains beneath the vault, the earth that is
webfooted with deserts is itself subject to the laws of
migration.
The feather summer is not over yet. The holds
have been opened and harvests of down are being
stuffed into them. The weather is moulting.
The cock on the steeple adorns the gunfire
smoke while the orange-breasted widow makes her
way to the cemetery whose crosses are the tiny
flashes of Senegalese Diamonds while man
continues to believe himself upon the earth like a
blackbird on a buffalo's back, upon the sea like a gull
on the crest of the waves; the blackbird solid and the
seagull liquid.
Horus, with a finger to his lips, is the
avalanche. I had not seen those birdcatchers who
search for men in the sky and drive each other from
their nests with stones they throw into the air.
Phoenixes come bringing me my food of glow
worms and their wings which ceaselessly dip into
the'gold of the earth are the sea and the sky which
we only used to see aglow on stormy days and which
hide their thunderbolt plumes among their feathers
when they fall asleep on the single foot of the air.
The mills of lightning have broken their shells
and flee as fast as their wings will carry them, sand
eats dunes, the horizon is trying to keep out of the
way of clouds.
You will agree that your drop-sided cots, and
your twisted bars, and your gnawed floors, and your
nutmegs, and your scarecrows in the latest fashion,
and your telegraph wires, and your journeys in
pigeon class compartments, and the lambs that
form the plinths of your statues of prey, and your
hurdle races run at dusk with robins that fly away,
and the hours, and the minutes, and the seconds in
your woodpecker heads, and your glorious
conquests, yes, your glorious cuckoo-like conquests!
All these snares of grace were only ever there to get
me through the gates of danger, the gates that
separate fear from courage. Do not count any more
on me to help you forget that your ghosts are decked
out like birds of paradise.
In the beginning was song. Everyone to the
windows! From one side to the other you see nothing
now but Leda. My whirling wings are the doors
through which she enters the swan's neck, on the
great deserted square that is the heart of the bird of
night.
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