‘Your hands are scissors that cut through my dream:’ an erotic poem by Czech surrealist Vítězslav Nezval
8 October 2021
Poem by:
Vítězslav Nezval
Translated by:
Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novická
Vítězslav Nezval (1900-1958) was an avant-garde Czech writer and a co-founder of the Surrealist movement in Czechoslovakia. The first English language edition of his poetry collection Woman in the Plural was recently published by Twisted Spoon Press, in the translation of Stephan Delbos and Tereza Novická. Get your copy of the book here.
song of songs
Your eyes two gunshots fired blindly
Two gunshots fired blindly right on target
Two gunshots fired blindly around the corner I turned
Like a convict looking for the prison yard’s end
Your eyes two party horns
Two distant carousels
Two bells
Two signets
Your eyes two thimbles of hemlock
Your eyes two gags for eternal silence
Two wicker baskets
Two test tubes
Two brass clock wheels
Your eyes two buttercups
Your eyes two perfect rhymes
Your eyes two field drums
Two sad funerals two window leaps
Your eyes two dreamless nights
Like apothecary scales
Like a double-barreled shotgun
Like a dual adieu
Your eyes like two cactus flowers
Like a single dumbbell
Like a two-volume novel
Like a ripped rose
Like the Tropic of Cancer with the Tropic of Capricorn
Like a fake ducat beside a real ducat
Like two disc brakes
Like sea and land like the Gemini like two timid sighs
Your lips are a red order
One salutes and stands at attention
As you withdraw you’re attended by eyes right
Of all those who swore an oath to you
Your lips are a soft velvet ribbon
Happily leaning over the tobacco plant
An eruption from the crater of a rose
A blowfly of sunstrokes
Your lips two spawning fish
A tinderbox with touchwood
A spice grinder
Your lips two award ribbons
Your lips are red-hot coals I stoke to burn my memories
And a huge carnivorous plant
A cockscomb
A breakfast plum cake
Your lips are a bleeding truffle
And a summer beehive
Your lips are an enigmatic monogram
Your lips are a weaving shuttle painted red
Your lips are a sugar bowl
But also a field of red poppies full of statues
Your lips are a golden spinning wheel
A seabed a moon crater
Your lips are a case for pearls
A sealed last will
A blazing skyrocket
A watch spring
Your lips are a lunar eclipse
A solar eclipse
An eclipse of Venus and Earth
Your hands are scissors that cut through my dream
Your hands spiders
As your shoulders quiver like a peacock
Your hands are ice packs
Your hands are flower buds
Your hands are raindrops
On breasts forming a vortex
Your breasts are phantasms
Like puffball dust clouds
Your breasts are like a cyclone concealing two ruby flames
Your breasts are a wasp’s nest
An hourglass two piles of semolina
A frozen bird
Your breasts are two oil lamps
Two hogtied hostages
Neon arrows
Boiling cream
Your breasts are snakes basking in the sun
Two corks in water
Two solitary mushrooms
Your breasts erect as a porcupine
Your breasts taking flight
Your breasts are two camellias in the hands of night
Two pigeons in a thief ’s clutches
Two dandelions
Your breasts like a jingle bell duet
Like opal
Like two whip cracks
Like baby cauliflower
Like two knots in a kerchief
Like the rising and setting sun like rising and setting Venus and Jupiter
Your belly is a fireball
With the scent of singed hair
Your belly is a rattan ladder
A storm at sea and the saddest reef
Your belly is a fowl with a turkey’s wattle
A colossal leech
A skid on black ice
Your belly is aquatic nettle
Horseradish leaf or a lapping flame
Your belly is a mill
And also the mill wheel pulverising a drowned corpse
A breaking wheel
A white louse with mandibles clasped in prayer
Your belly is whitewash
Kneaded dough a white-hot fork
A kangaroo overwintering
A dim mirror and undersea evening
Your belly a cloud before a storm
A pond amid a moonlit night
Your belly of organdy soaked in black ink
Your sex is a marvellous deception
Will-o’-the-wisp or sage
Your sex is a split willow whistle
Like the residue of reseda soap
Like the mouth of an earthworm
Like a baby pea pod
Like a moist affectionate eye
Like a Libellula
Like a Mimosa
Your sex like a firefly in the heart of a cabbage rose
As if you’re from black elderberry marrow
From white asbestos fiber glowing in the fire
From a mix of magnolia dough and dark rye flour
From worm-eaten rose mahogany
Your legs are the clash of two flashes of sheet lightning
Of two melancholies
Of two lengthy rivers
Your legs like water beetles
Like magnesium flashes
Like winter nights
Like long equations
Your legs like drunken grape harvests
Like a harbour dance
Your legs like war
Your crotch is a soldering flame
A butterfly’s flight a ship’s propellor
Your hips are a cavalcade
Your hips are Geissler tubes
Your hips are indolence itself
A spindle’s hum a viola’s shadow
Your brow is a spark
Your teeth a press
Your ears stray question marks
Your neck a waterfall
You are like day fading into night fading into day fading
into phantasm
