A surrealist in the twenties, praised
by Breton for dictating epigrams while
asleep. Others were met by servants
with torches and informed they too
were servants. Broke with Breton in 1930
over a description of the sex organs
of a starfish. It rained. The plain
and lower hill were covered with hoplites
only pretending to be wounded. Gears
made bouquets in the air until the clouds
became grease. Meanwhile, Desnos wrote
radio plays for children and made himself
a vest of ice. He’d forgotten he should
have been screaming. The chains and nets
around him formed layer upon interlocking
layer until the entire workforce became
a cylindrical mass. I have dreamed of you
so often, you are no longer real, he
dictated but then what was always real
became realer, the stitch made longer
or shorter by a varying eccentric stroke.
He held up a broken doll in the street,
trying to make it sing. During the war,
Desnos stole small silver bells for
the Resistance. In the gyroscope,
momentum and the rotational axis
preserve their direction as long as
no external force acts upon it but
how long do you think that could last?
Arrested by the Gestapo and sent to
Buchenwald in April, blood filled
his lungs shortly after liberation.
He drowned in the middle of a dirt road,
his remains identified only by the words
shining on his forehead: shadow
moves on and goes on moving, brightly
over the sundial of our lives.