All poetries are inspired by the omonymous painting. In brackets the painter.

 

ADELITA ESCAPES (Leonora Carrington)

 

Towards a new opening.

While the rest of the world,

inert,

falls into emptiness.

 

Like Aquila,

astride senses expanded and matched

to new Selves.

Truth. Logical evidence. Natural science.

Victory. Over time’s wall. Defeated

by the impetus of human thought

set free in the Dream.

 

Run away, Adelita, run!

Seize the proof, flee the cave, see how the sun’s really made.

But don’t talk about it,

don’t tell a soul,

don’t fall into reality…reign of limits, of ancestral deceptions.

You can’t talk to deaf people, or show to the blind

the most occult secrets of Forbidden Knowledge.

How can an ant understand what a star is?

They’ll think you’re crazy: don’t say a word!

 

There’s only one way for you not to talk:

Don’t come back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE ISLE OF THE DEAD (Arnold Böcklin)

 

Towards the greatest of all Mysteries,

revealed and resolved in all its power.

At last we exist upright, vertically.

and the smell of death pervades every breath,

every hollow of this island that throbs like a heart.

 

And the sky and the sea

make one mirror, one regal frame

for freed karma.

In the presence of trees whose own language

is perfect and masterful.

 

And the stones that persist

beyond dreams of time

are still watching all who arrive

on this island whence no one depart.

 

 

 

 

A PRIVATE VIEW OF VENICE (Enrique Chavarria)

 

Spaces expand, they’re stories. They have wings. They hover

[in the alchemical mosaic of the Surreal.

The singer of tales brings with him the confines of the world.

But even as he speaks, the Dream sketches, redefines,

the impossibility of boundaries.

 

 

 

 

IN PERFUME (Giorgio Dalla Costa)

 

Detached from time. Stored in oblivion or clinging to the present.

It is.

It swims in the senses’ pleasure, or the reality of thoughts.

Like a fogbank (un)certain, apodictic, exploding.

Creating Selves. Past the veil

that enfolds a dream

without fragrance.

Unseen. Celestial concealment.

I stay here, in the twilight of every smile. Following it.

 

 

 

THE CRYSTAL WARRIOR (Giorgio Dalla Costa)

 

Shield, like the Vortex of being.

Glance protected from doubles

[concealed in all things.

Body. Nude horizon. Eternal. The anima(l) that asks for a face

[dwells within.

At ease on a Throne crafted of vortices. And words.

He sings of the anima(l),

defending its essence with the Shield’s very aura. He reigns there,

[enthroned, meditating in

silence, casting enchantments..

 

At the same time the world ends, the last dance begins,

reincarnating itself in a naked mask’s breath.

Essential. Disastrous. Forgetting, evoking a place made of mirrors

[that gaze into themselves, like

distracted passersby in the crowd that we glimpse in pictures half-

[hidden by regal frames, dreamed-of shields.

 

Old, dead, broken, abstract, bent, consumed and corroded by time’s

[nonexistence.

Shadowed by matter, the Spirit gleams from a last sea, unmasked,

steeply jutting from the transparent blue, draped in a cloak that I alone see,

while the sky is of crystal,

and I’m alive. Like a statue.

A work of art by a warrior come from Beyond.

 

 

 

IRENE AND HER SISTERS (Tamara De Lempicka)

 

Flesh freighted with secrets brushes past in the soul,

gathering the Mysteries

awaiting within.

 

Past the veil of the eyelids, unknown wiles, inhabiting worlds

worn smooth with pleasure.

 

All is One, in the occult joy that rips open existence.

All is One without words.

All is One.

 

 

 

LES PROMENEUSES (Paul Delvaux)

 

Two poems stroll, incarnating Sophia: Holy Wisdom.

They emanate from

the shape of a reality

that lies sleeping

unhappy,

not attuned

to a higher vibration.

Only a reflection, spilling over the contours. Crumbling them.

Elegance, on the other hand, passes through time.

And keeps to its path.

Creating aesthetic flashes, metaphysical majesty,

A soft oscillation from real to unreal.

Creating a world with each step,

austere stones with magical powers,

beacause of you, reality learned of smiles.

While I masturbate, faced with such wisdom.

Eternal love, between me and the Muses.

Eternal love.

 

 

 

NYMPHS BATHING (Paul Delvaux)

 

Arcane music rains from the sky,

wrinkling the sea.

My senses bend

to the howling waves.

Invisible, I revel in their power.

For them, what am I but a sound like dried leaves?

I play on,

borne by the thunder

that crashes within.

 

The intoxication of being,

Of entering a picture, set in the echo

of an arpeggio, ethereal, darkling,

My deep delight.

It seems real,

but again the waves confuse smiles,

soaking tears, scraps of sound,

suspended in time

like unseen thoughts, arcane and suffused.

Dazed by emotion, you come and you go, shattered and dreamed of:

these are waves that I paint,

turned to stone in a dream of deafening magic.

But who are they?

 

Nymphs tightly clasped in a sea of ideas,

or dreams made incarnate in a castle of mirrors?

Beauty itself.

I sail exposed to the rays of a sun

composed of ideas, perceptions long gone;

bleaching space, fading out

the sure contours of a stilled reality. An etheric substance,

a marmoreal syllogism: deaf, naked and white as the

corpse that exudes it.

 

Nothing exists

but aftershocks

and the emptiness coursing

throughout my drenched body.

Bursting into the I, blunted now. A wild

trembling consumes me.

Subtly an orgasm takes total control,

as I float in a sea that can clutch, draw me under.

Near the Nymphs. I moan softly;

for they’re sculpted across the pleasure I take.

 

This is what I am now: an orgy of Art,

so close to the Muses who vibrate in time

with my Higher Self, my firm undulation.

One of them lies back on the turbulent sea,

caught in the dream she keeps on creating;

the other is soaked, and she’s having visions

that devour her gaze, at the Id’s mercy.

And the antechamber of Self

fades away, fades to vanishing.

 

Both of them see themselves light years apart,

although only one wave keeps their essences separate.

In between, further off, is a third one: she asks herself questions

[in front of a ghost,

sustaining his soul and lifting its veil.

In the distance, a fourth one, in full view of heaven,

moves past her name, firm and decisive, stubborn,

like one who has power to drown every Why. And bury its flavors.

 

All around them is music,

petrified in the sky

that’s calm, splashed with clouds, all impervious to an

[omnipotent sea,

grey and bold, like soldiers adrift,

dreamed up and en-chanted by the murmurous waves.

 

 

 

LES CARCANS (Leonor Fini)

 

One and trine.

Allegorical power

Of evoking what’s real.

And look into its eyes.

The fascination of a mystery, wet with pleasure.

 

 

 

 

RED SHOES (Jeremy Lipking)

 

A sleeping man

“binds together strands of years,”

so said Proust.

A dreaming woman

entwines the thread of poems

that hope to penetrate her.

 

 

 

FLIGHT OF THE CHURCHES (Brigid Marlin)

 

It’s just as well they’re going

Up there. They’ll get clean

In their paradise.

Or wherever they fly.

We stay here, proud in our purity.

Naked. Orgasmic. Earthbound. Inwardly Dionysiac.

Leave us in peace.

Go away.

Make room for the truth.

Nothing here belongs to you,

Except for your madness.

And the pain you’ve inflicted

fucking the planet.

 

 

 

 

INTO THE WOODS (Sandra Scolnik)

 

Farewell, great world,

I’m off to dig out another one.

Because I don’t seek, I find.

The forest is magical. So is the world.

 

 

 

SISTERS OF NORTH NOCTURNE (Serge Sunne)

 

From the dream of a Poet-Demiurge,

confirmed by what melts waves of music.

They really do live inside spoken poems.

They exist in a space that precedes fables,

shaping a world made of joy, suffocating, suffused. Ethereal.

Chanting, they are leading an orchestra

through hyperuranic melodies and archetypical substances,

ancestral symbologies of arcane thought,

whose echo resounds through long-dissoved eons, unwound and

reverberant in the atrium of my interior Temple. Come to rest at

the threshold of a new world, impervious, erect on strong columns;

magical, self-revealed, beloved of wildness.

Where they dwell, not even the Sun can withstand such an impact,

the shock of existing beyond ordinary dreams.

 

 

 

 

THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THERE (Wainer Vaccari)

 

They are time’s mysteries.

They have always been there.

Consuming my space.

 

Imposing form on the moment,

giving it the reality

and concreteness of mystery.

All in line, one by one,

they spin the thread of return.

The eternal return of the rarest of instants.

 

They have always been there,

like all-knowing vessels,

scanning the horizon for secret demands.

Like fossil philosophers,

hunched in thought,

hung up on a reason

that spellbound them forever,

stole them from life.

 

They are invisible,

and yet terribly pungent.

My gaze slowly penetrates

into their presence.

Which persists within. There it stays.

 

 

 

 

INSANITY (Dino Valls)

 

Metaphysical vertigo,

ontological suspense,

beclouded.

An aesthetic migraine,

oceanic exhaustion.

A steep cliff, headfirst tumble, trapped in being.

Whose abysses, bright children still call Psyche.

Angels dwell

within outward appearances.

Men see

nothing other than words.

While I sense a primordial pleasure:

Truth.

Ejaculated in a look.

 

 

 

 

FENOMENO (Remedios Varo)

 

Each self is the noumen of what seems to be shadow.

 

 

ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY ANN MC GARRELL

All poetries from the book: SURREALIST ALCHEMY.

 

music: brad mehldau, paranoid android, radiohead cover.