In the warm air of the ceiling the footlights of dreams are illuminated.

The white walls have curved. The burdened chest breathes confused words. In the mirror, the wind from the south spins, 
carrying leaves and feathers. The window is blocked. The heart is 
almost extinguished among the already cold ashes of the moon—the hands are without shelter—as all the trees lying down. In the wind from the desert the needles bend and my hour is past.

Basic Set-Up:

This is a complete poem, "Clock," by Pierre Reverdy.

The word "dreams" shows up in the first line of this prose-poem, cluing us in to the fact that, yup, this piece is all about dreams and fantasy. The imagery that follows evokes a dream—it's strange and weird and jumbled. "The white walls have curved" and the "heart is almost extinguished among the already cold ashes of the moon." What's a heart doing up among the cold ashes of the moon, we might ask? Not to mention those needles bending in the desert.

The poem, in other words, creates a dream or fantasy landscape. It creates a vision that's kind of real, but not quite. It's surreal.

Don't let the publication date fool you—this poem was written during the Surrealist heyday. Ol' Reverdy passed away in 1960.

The form of this poem was kind of out there by early-20th-century standards. That's because it's written as a prose poem—there are no line breaks, just paragraph breaks. "Clock," in other words, is a poem that breaks the rules that we conventionally associate with poetry. The style and the presentation of the traditional poem are unusual. And we know that the Surrealists were huge fans of the unusual.

The Surrealists, of course, are writers who like to break conventions. The unusual form of this poem is a great example of the way in which Surrealists like Reverdy like to bend the rules, even to break them, in order to come up with new poetic forms and ways of writing.

Today, prose poetry is alive and well and considered a dominant subgenre of poetics. We have trailblazers like Reverdy to thank for that.