These six poems by Max Ernst (1891-1976) are translated from the French.

A.C. Evans' recent work can also be found in Void. He lives in England.

Colouraft

Amazement grips us
Before your perfumes
Of perfidious asphalt
Of calcified chocolate
Of consummated nights
Of cruel foliage
Of wet Medusa linen

Colorado

Colour

Raft

Of

Medusa

Glade

At the conjunction (benign?) of two monuments where
The first is dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci (or to all
Other divinities) the next to W C Fields (or his frivolous
Turtledove) the kings (they are the rest) are playing
With their queens. A laugh loses itself across the ages
And a flock of seagulls continues to hover over the heart
Of winter.

Hill

Seen through the naked eye
This hill is twice as young as its age
For your beautiful naked eyes
She clothes herself with plumes and lead
And a secret, transient sky

But

Viewed through temperament
She takes fire
She encrimsons
Roars
Trombones and booms
In the silences of space
Like a pyramid enraged
Which laughs twice a century
Laughs
With a hazy smile

Laughs

Without rival or reason

Then its terrible love chant
Explodes between two beds of glass.

Insignia

For a school of imponderables

Three young Dionysaphrodites
Four crystalline temperaments
A school of seagulls
The obscure gods
The parricidal butterflies
Another beautiful morning
The rules of the game
A small nocturnal fairy

And

For Alice's friends

Madeleine

In the deeps of the Atlantic aquarium
A Madeleine hotly weeps pearls
Gentlemen, make eyes
Ladies, don't look

Lost in the deeps of the Atlantic aquarium
Scalded by an Orient of her own tears
A Madeleine
(Manic rhyme)
Ensconces herself in her woolly mane
Madeleine
Stewing herself
Mothersoaking herself
Cacapricking herself
And
Not rhyming again.

The Moon is a Mute Nightingale

The moon shadows herself on Sundays
On Monday the moon is dark
And Thursdays and Fridays
And so on and so forth.