Читать книгу Selected Writings of César Vallejo - César Vallejo - Страница 18

FROM Trilce

I

Who’s making all that racket,¹ and not even letting

the islands that linger make a will.

A little more consideration

as it will be late, early,

and easier to assay

the guano,² the simple fecapital³ ponk⁴

a brackish gannet

toasts unintentionally,

in the insular heart, to each hyaloid

squall.

A little more consideration,

and liquid muck, six in the evening

OF THE MOST GRANDIOSE B-FLATS

And the peninsula raises up

from behind, muzziled,⁵ imperturbable

on the fatal balance line.

[CE]

II

Time Time.

Noon clogged up nighttime fog.⁶

Boring pump of the cellblock backwashes

time time time time.

Was Was.

Roosters songsing⁷ scratching in vain.

Clear day’s mouth that conjugates

was was was was.

Tomorrow Tomorrow.

The warm repose of being though.

The present thinks hold on to me for

tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow.

Name Name.

What calls all that puts on hedge us?⁸

It’s called Thesame that suffers

name name name namE.⁹

[JM]

IV

Two carts grind our eardrums down

three-pwronged¹⁰ to our tear ducts, when

we never did anything to them.

To that other yes, unloved,

embitternessed¹¹ in tunnel unsheltered

by the one, and over tough aljid¹²

spiritizing tests.

I stretched out like a third party,

but the evening—whatta whe to do—

rings around my head, furiously

not wanting two dose up on mother.¹³ They are

the rings.

They’re the already chawed nuptial tropics.

The withdrawal, best of all,

shatters the Crucible.

That not having discolored

at all. Side by side with fate and cries

and cries. The whole song

squared into three silences.

Heat. Ovary. Nearly transparency.

All’s been mourned. Vigil’s been utterly kept

in deep left.

[JM]

VI

The suit that tomorrow I wore

my laundress has not washed:

she used to wash it in her otilian¹⁴ veins,

at the brook of her heart, and I need today

not ask myself if I’ve left the suit

tinged with injustice.

At this our¹⁵ when no one’s going to the water,

the fabric for feathering

fledges on my guidelines, and everything

on the nightstand of so much what’ll become of me¹⁶

is not all mine

at my side.

They stayed put in her possession,

bonded, sealed up with her flaxen goodness.

And if I knew that she would return;

and if I knew what morning she’d walk in

to deliver me cleaned the clothes, that soul

laundress of mine. What a morning she’d walk in,

satisfied, a goldenberry of labor, delighted

to prove that yes she does know, that yes she can

HOW COULD SHE NOT!

dye blue and iron out all the chaoses.

[JM]

IX

I sdrive to dddeflect at a blow the blow.

Her two broad leaves, her valve

opening in succulent reception

from multiplicand to multiplier,

her condition excellent for pleasure,

all readies truth.¹⁷

I strive to ddeflect at a blow the blow.

To her flattery, I transasfixiate¹⁸ Bolivarian asperities

at thirty-two cables and their multiples,

hair for hair majestic thick lips,

the two tomes of the Work, constringe,

and I do not live absence then,

not even by touch.

I fail to teflect at a blow the blow.

We will never saddle the torose Trool

of egotism or of that mortal chafe

of the bedsheet,

since this here woman

—how she weighs being general!

And female is the soul of the absent-she.

And female is my own soul.

[CE]

X

Primary and final stone of groundless

chance, has soul and all

just died, October bedroom and pregnant.

From three months of absent and ten of sweet.

How fate,

the mitred monodactyl, laughs.

How unions of contraries

despair behind. How always the digit emerges

beneath all avatar lineage.

How whales go dutch with doves.¹⁹

How these in turn abandon their beak

cubed up in third wing.

How we saddlebow,²⁰ facing monotonous haunches.

Toward the tenth are ten months towed,

toward another beyond.

At least two are still in diapers.

And the three months of absence.

And the nine of gestation.

There’s not even any violence.

The patient props himself up,

and seated smears on the soothing salfe.²¹

[JM]

XIII

I think about your sex.

My heart simplified, I think about your sex,

before the ripe daughterloin²² of day.

I touch the bud of joy, it is in season.

And an ancient sentiment dies

degenerated into brains.

I think about your sex, furrow more prolific

and harmonious than the belly of the Shadow,

though Death conceives and bears

from God himself.

Oh Conscience,

I am thinking, yes, about the free beast

who takes pleasure where he wants, where he can.

Oh, scandal of the honey of twilights.

Oh mute thunder.

Rednuhtetum!

[CE]

XVII

This 2 distills in a single batch,

and together we’ll finish it off.

No one’d heard me. Striate urent

civil abracadabra.

The morning doesn’t touch like the first,

like the last stone ovulatable²³

by force of secrecy. The barefoot morning.

The clay halfway

between gray matters, more and less.

Faces do not know of the face, nor of the

walk to the encounters.

And without a toward the exergue may nod.

The tip of fervor wanders.

June, you’re ours. June, and on your shoulders

I stand up to guffaw, drying

my meter and my pockets

on your 21 seasonal fingernails.

Good! Good!

[CE]

XVIII

Oh the four walls of the cell.

Ah the four whitening walls

that irrefutably face the same number.

Breeding ground of nerves, evil breach,

through its four corners how it snaps

apart daily shackled extremities.

Loving keeper of innumerable keys,

if you were here, if you could see

unto what hour these walls are four.

Against them we’d be with you, just the two,

more two than ever. And you wouldn’t even cry,

speak, liberator!

Ah the four walls of the cell.

Meanwhile as for those that hurt me, most

the two lengthy ones that tonight

have something of mothers who now

deceased each lead through bromined slides,²⁴

a child by the hand.

And only will I keep my hold,

with my right hand, that makes do for both,

upraised, in search of a tertiary arm

that must pupilate, between my where and when,

this stunted adulthood of man.²⁵

[JM]

XX

Flush with the beaten froth bulwarked

by ideal stone. Thus I barely

render 1 near 1 so as not to fall.

That mustachioed man. The sun,

his only wheel iron-rimmed, fifth and perfect,

and upwardly from it.

Clamor of crotch buttons

free,

clamor that reprehends A vertical subordinate.

Juridical drainage. Pleasant prank.

But I suffer. Hereabouts I suffer. Thereabouts I suffer.

And here I am doting, I am

one beautiful person, when

williamthesecondary man

toils and sweats happiness

in gushes, putting a shine on the shoe

of his little three-year-old girl.

Shaggy cocks his head and rubs one side.

The girl meanwhile sticks her forefinger

on her tongue which starts spelling

the tangles of tangles of the tangles,

and she daubs the other shoe, secretly,

with an itty bit of silyba and dirt,²⁶

but only with,

an itty bi-

.t.

[JM]

XXIII

Estuous oven of those my sweet rolls

pure infantile innumerable yolk, mother.

Oh your four gorges, astoundingly

mislamented, mother: your beggars.

The two youngest sisters, Miguel who has died

and me still pulling

one braid for each letter in the primer.

In the room upstairs you handed out to us

in the morning, in the evening, from a dual stowage,

those delicious hosts of time, so

that now we’d have more than enough

clock husks in flexion of 24 hours

stopped on the dot.

Mother, and now! Now, in which alveolus

might remain, on what capillary sprout,

a certain crumb that today perplexed in my throat

doesn’t want to go down. Today when even

your pure bones might be flour

with nowhere to knead

—tender confectioner of love,

even in raw shade, even in the great molar

whose gum throbs on that lacteal dimple

which unseen builds and abounds—you saw it so often!

in closed hands newborn.

So the earth will hear in your silencing,

how they keep charging us all

rent on the world in which you leave us

and the cost of that interminable bread.

And they charge us for it, when, being only

children then, as you could see,

we couldn’t have snatched it

from anyone; when you gave it to us,

no, mama?

[CE]

XXV

Chess bishops upthrust to stick²⁷

to lute, down deep, to napes,

to upright numerators’ undersides.

Bishops and burs from lupine piles.

As the lee of each unraveled

carabel snorts, without amerecanizing,²⁸

blighting ploughtails in spasm slacken,

with the scanty pulse improperly prone

to blowing its nose on the back of its wrist.

And the sharpest sopranancy

gets tonsured, ensnared, and at length

imnazaled²⁹ near icicles

of infinite pity.

Biggity haunches huff hard

to bear, pendent on musty breast plates

standards with their seven colors

under zero, from guano islands

to guano islands.

Hence the honey harvests in the wide open of bad

faith.

Hence the time of the rounds. Hence the man of the back

roads onward to future planes,

when innanimous gryphion only reports

blundered mute-due crusades.³⁰

So then bishops come even to stick

to trapdoors and to rough drafts.

[JM]

XXVIII

I’ve had lunch alone now, and without any

mother, or may I have, or help yourself, or water,

or father who, over the eloquent offertory

of ears of corn, asks for his postponed

image, between the greater clasps of sound.

How could I have had lunch. How served myself

these things from such distant plates,

when my own home will have broken up,

when not even mother appears at my lips.

How could I have had a nothing lunch.

At the table of a good friend I’ve had lunch

with his father just arrived from the world,

with his white-haired aunts who speak

in dapple-gray tinkle of porcelain,

mumbling through all their widow alveoli;

and with generous place settings of lively tootlings,

because they’re in their own home. What a snap!

And the knives on this table

have hurt me all over my palate.

Viandry³¹ at such tables, where one tastes

someone else’s love instead of one’s own,

turns into earth the mouthful not offered by

MOTHER,

makes the hard degllusion³² a blow; the dessert,

bile; the coffee, funereal oil.

Now when my own home has broken up,

and the maternal help yourself does not leave the

tomb,

the kitchen in darkness, the misery of love.

[CE]

XXX

Burn of the second

in all of yearning’s tender carnage,

platter of vigrant³³ chilies,

at two in the immoral afternoon.

Warrant of edges edge to edge.

Heady truth tapped alive, upon hooking up

our sexual antenna

to what we’re being unawares.

Dishwater of maximum ablution.

Voyaging crocks

that collide and spatter from fresh unanimous

shadow, the color, fraction, enduring life,

the eternal enduring life.

Don’t fret. Such is Death.

The sex blood of the Beloved, who all sweetnessed-up³⁴

bemoans such lugging around so much

for such a ridiculous reason.

And the circuit

between our poor day and the big night,

at two in the immoral afternoon.

[JM]

XXXI

Hope between cotton bawls.³⁵

Uniform husky arris

of magnificent spore woven threats

and with porter buttons inborn.

Are six rubbed out by sun?

Nativity. Shut up, fear.

Christian I hope, ever hope

kneeling down upon the circular stone

that on this chance’s hundred corners

is so vague where I appear.

And God overwhelmed subdues

our pulse, silent, grave,

and as father to his babe

barely,

but barely, half-opens up bloody cotton balls

and takes hold of hope between his fingers.

Lord, it’s I who want it …

And that’s enough!

[JM]

XXXVI

We struggle to thread ourselves through a needle’s eye,

face to face, hell-bent on winning.³⁶

The fourth angle of the circle ammoniafies³⁷ almost.

Female is continued the male, on the basis

of probable breasts, and precisely

on the basis of how much does not flower.

Are you that way, Venus de Milo?

You hardly act crippled, pullulating

enwombed in the plenary arms

of existence,

of this existence that neverthelessez³⁸

perpetual imperfection.

Venus de Milo, whose cut-off, increate

arm swings round and tries to elbow

across greening stuttering pebbles,

ortive nautili, recently crawling

evens, immortal on the eves of.

Lassoer of imminences, lassoer

of the parenthesis.

Refuse, all of you, to set foot

on the double security of Harmony.

Truly refuse symmetry.

Intervene in the conflict

of points that contend

in the most rutty of jousts

for the leap through the needle’s eye!

So now I feel my little finger

in excess on my left. I see it and think

it shouldn’t be me, or at least that it’s

in a place where it shouldn’t be.

And it inspires me with rage and alarms me

and there is no way out of it, except by

imagining that today is Thursday.

Make way for the new odd number

potent with orphanhood!

[CE]

XXXVIII

This crystal waits to be sipped

in the rough by a future mouth

without teeth. Not toothless.

This crystal is bread yet to come.

It wounds when they force it

and no longer shows animal affection.

But if it gets excited, it could deposit honey

and become a sugar mold for nouns

which adjectivize in self-offerings.

Those who see it there a sad colorless

individual, could dispatch it for love,

through the past and at most into the future:

if it does not surrender any of its sides;

if it waits to be sipped in a gulp

and as transparence, by a future mou-

th at will no longer have teeth.

This crystal has passed from animal,

and now goes off to form lefts,

the new Minuses.

Just leave it alone.

[CE]

XLII

Wait, all of you. Now I’m going to tell you

everything. All of you wait this headache

may subsside. Wait.

Where have you left yourselves

that you’re never needed?

No one’s needed! Very good.

Rosa, entering from the top floor.

I feel like a child. And again rosa:

you don’t even know where I’m going.

Is the death star reeling?

Or are strange sewing machines

inside the left side.

All of you wait one moment more.

No one has seen us. Pure one

search for your waist.

Where have your eyes popped!

Enter reincarnated the parlors

of western crystal. Exact

music plays almost a pity.

I feel better. Without fever, and fervent.

Spring. Peru. I open my eyes.

Ave! Don’t leave. God, as if suspecting

some ebbless flow ay.

A facial shovelful, the curtain sweeps

nigh to the prompt boxes.

Acrisia. Tilia, go to bed.

[CE]

XLIV

This piano journeys within,

it journeys in merry leaps.

Then meditates in iron-plated repose,

nailed into ten horizons.

Onward it goes. Down into tunnels it stoops,

yonder, down into tunnels of pain,

down into vertebrae that naturally fugue.

Other times its tubes go,

lingering asias yellow from living,

enter eclipse,

and delouse do insectile nightmares,

now dead from thunder, the herald of geneses.

Dark piano, on whom do you spy

with your deafness that hears me,

with your muteness that deafens me?

Oh mysterious pulse.

[JM]

XLV

I lose contact with the sea

when the waters come to me.

Let us always depart. Let us savor

the stupendous song, the song expressed

by the lower lips of desire.

Oh prodigious maidenhood.

The saltless breeze passes.

In the distance I scent the pith

listening to the deep sounding, in search

of undertow keys.

And if in this way we bang head-on

into the absurd,

we’ll cover ourselves with the gold of having nothing,

and will hatch the yet unborn wing

of night, the sister

of this orphan wing of day,

that by dint of being one no longer is a wing.

[CE]

XLIX

Murmured in restlessness, I cross,

my long suit of feeling, the Mondays

of truth.

Nobody seeks or recognizes me,

and even I have forgotten

from whom I might be.

A certain wardrobe, only she, will know

us all in the white leaves

of certificates.

That wardrobe, she alone,

while returning from each faction,

of each candelabrum

blind from birth.

Nor do I come upon anyone, beneath

this humus that iridesends³⁹ the Mondays

of reason;

and I no more than smile at each spike

of the gratings, in the mad search

for the known.

Good wardrobe, open up for me

your white leaves;

I want at least to recognize 1,

I want the fulcrum, I at least

want to know of being.

Offstage where we dress,

there’s not, there Is no one: only leaves

opened up wide.

And always the suits letting go

by themselves, from the hangers

like ghastly guiding pointers,

and departing without bodies, vacant,

even to the prudent hint

of a grand wing stock with causes

and limits fried deep.

Right down to the bone!

[JM]

L

Cerberus four times

per day his padlock wields, opening

closing our sternums, with winks

we comprehend perfectly.

With astounded melancholic breeches,

childish in transcendental disarray,

standing, the poor ole man is adorable.

He jokes with the prisoners, chockfull

the groins with jabs. And lunkhead even

gnaws on some crust for them; but always

just doing his job.

In between the bars he sticks the fiscal

point, unseen, hoisting up the phalanx

of his pinky,

on the trail of what I say,

what I eat,

what I dream.

The raven wants there nevermore be insides,

and how we ache from this that Cerberus wants.

In a clockwork system, the imminent,

pythagorean! ole man plays

breadthwise in the aortas. And only

from time to night, by night

he somewhat skirts his exception from metal.

But, naturally,

always just doing his job.

[JM]

LII

And we’ll get up when we feel

like it, even though mama all luminosity

rouses us with melodious

and charming maternal anger.

We’ll laugh in secret about this,

biting the edge of the warm vicuña

quilts—and don’t do that to me!

Fumes from thatched huts—ah bunch

of scamps!—rising early to play

with bluish, bluing kites,

and, copping grinders and stones, they’d

pungently incite us with cow dung,

to draw us out

into the baby air that doesn’t know its letters yet,

to struggle over the strings.

Another time you’ll want to pasture

between your omphaloid hollows

avid caverns,

ninth months,

my drop curtains.

Or you’ll want to accompany the elders

to unplug the tap of a dusk,

so that all the water slipping away by night

surges during the day.

And you arrive dying of laughter,

and at the musical lunch,

popped roasted corn, flour with lard,

with lard,

you tease the decubital peasant

who today once again forgets to say buenos días,

those días of his, buenos with the b of barrens,

that keep backfiring for the poor guy

through the dentilabial

v that holds vigil in him.

[CE]

LV

Samain would say⁴⁰ the air is calm and of a contained sadness.

Vallejo says today Death is soldering each limit to each strand of lost hair, from the bucket of a frontal, where there is seaweed, lemon balm that sings of divine seedbeds on the alert, and antiseptic verses with no master.

Wednesday, with dethroned fingernails peels back its own nails of camphor, and instills through dusty sieves, echoes, turned pages, incrustations,

the buzzings of flies

when there is corpse, and clear spongy suffering and some hope.

A sickman reads La Prensa,⁴¹ as if at a lectern.

Another is laid out palpitating, longirostrine,

about to be buried.

And I notice a shoulder is still in place

and almost stays ready behind this one, the other side.

The afternoon has now passed sixteen times through the

empatrolled⁴² subsoil,

and is almost absent

in the yellow wood number

on the bed that’s been unoccupied for so long

over there . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

in front.

[CE]

LVI

Every day I wake blindly

to work so as to live; and I eat breakfast,

not tasting a bit of it, every morning.

Not knowing if I have achieved, or even more, never,

something that explodes with flavor

or is merely the heart and that returned now, will lament

to what extent this is the least.

A child could grow up bloated with happiness

oh dawns,

before the grief of parents unable to avoid

wrenching us from their dreams of love into this world;

before those who, like God, from so much love

understood themselves even as creators

and loved us even to doing us harm.

Fringes of a invisible weft,

teeth that ferret from neuter emotion,

pillars

free of base and crown,

in the great mouth that has lost speech.

Match after match in the blackness,

tear after tear in clouds of dust.

[CE]

LVII

The highest points craterized, the points

of love, of capital being, I drink, I fast, I ab-

sorb heroin for the sorrow, for the languid

throb and against all correction.

Can I say that they’ve betrayed us? No.

That all were good? Neither. But

good will exists there, no doubt,

and above all, being so.

And so what who loves himself so! I seek myself

in my own design which was to be a work

of mine, in vain: nothing managed to be free.

And yet, who pushes me.

I bet I don’t dare shut the fifth window.

And the role of loving oneself and persisting, close to the

hours and to what is undue.

And this and that.

[CE]

LVIII

In the cell, in what’s solid, the

corners are huddling too.

I straighten up the nudes that’re crumpling,

doubling over, stripshredding.⁴³

I dismount the panting horse, snorting

lines of slaps and horizons;

lathered foot against three hoofs.

And I help him along: Move, animal!

Less could be taken, always less, from what

I’m obliged to distribute,

in the cell, in what’s liquid.

The prison mate used to eat wheat

from the hills, with my spoon,

when, at my parents’ table, a child,

I’d fall asleep chewing.

I whisper to the other:

Come back, go out by the other corner;

hurry up … hurry … hasten!

And unnoticed I adduce, I plan,

nigh to the broken-down makeshift bed, pious:

Don’t think so. That doctor was a healthy man.

I’ll no longer laugh when my mother prays

in childhood and on Sunday, at four o’clock

in the morning, for travelers,

the imprisoned,

the sick

and the poor.

In the sheepfold of children, I’ll no longer aim

punches at anyone, who, afterward,

still bleeding, might whimper: Next Saturday

I’ll give you some of my lunch meat, but

don’t hit me!

Now I won’t tell him OK.

In the cell, in the gas boundless

until balling in condensation,

who’s stumbling outside?

[CE]

LXI

Tonight I get down from my horse,

before the door of the house, where

I said farewell with the cock’s crowing.

It is shut and no one responds.

The stone bench on which mama gave birth

to my older brother, so he could saddle

backs I had ridden bare,

through lanes, past hedges, a village boy;

the bench on which I left my heartsick childhood

yellowing in the sun … And this mourning

that frames the portal?

God in alien peace,

the beast sneezes, as if calling too;

noses about, prodding the cobbles. Then doubts,

whinnies,

his ears all ears.

Papa must be up praying, and perhaps

he will think I am late.

My sisters, humming their simple,

bubblish⁴⁴ illusions,

preparing for the approaching holy day,

and now it’s almost here.

I wait, I wait, my heart

an egg in its moment, that gets blocked.

Large family that we left

not long ago, no one awake now, and not even a candle

placed on the altar so that we might return.

I call again, and nothing.

We fall silent and begin to sob, and the animal

whinnies, keeps on whinnying.

They’re all sleeping forever,

and so nicely, that at last

my horse dead-tired starts nodding

in his turn, and half-asleep, with each pardon, says

it’s all right, everything is quite all right.

[CE]

LXIII

Dawn cracks raining. Well combed

the morning pours forth its fine hair.

Melancholy’s bound;

and on the Hindu-furnished ill-paved oxident,⁴⁵

it veers, destiny hardly settles down.

Heavens of puna disheartened

by great love, heavens of platinum, dizmal⁴⁶

with impossible.

The sheepfold chews its cud

and is underscored by an Andean whinny.

I remember myself. But the wind staves

suffice, the rudders so still

until becoming one,

and the tedium cricket and unbreakable gibbous elbow.

Morning suffices with free natty manes

of precious, highland tar,

when I leave to look for eleven

and it’s not but untimely twelve.

[JM]

LXV

Mother, tomorrow I am going to Santiago,

to dip myself in your blessing and in your tears.

I am taking on my disillusions and the rosy

sore of my pointless tasks.

Your arch of astonishment will await me,

the tonsured columns of your longings

that exhaust life. The patio will await me,

the downstairs corridor with its tori⁴⁷ and festive

pie edgings. My tutorial armchair will await me,

that solid bigjawed piece of dynastic

leather, forever grumbling to the great-great-grandchild

rumps, from strap to strand.

I am sifting my purest affections.

I am axling⁴⁸—don’t you hear the plummet gasping?

—don’t you hear the reveilles champing?⁴⁹

I am molding your love formula

for all the hollows of this ground.

Oh if only tacit volantes were available

for all the most distant ribbons,

for all the most diverse appointments.

There, there, immortal dead one. There, there.

Under the double arches of your blood, where

one can only pass on tiptoes, even my father

to go through there,

humblest⁵⁰ himself until less than half a man,

until being the first child that you had.

There, there, immortal dead one.

In the colonnade of your bones

which not even sobs can topple,

and in whose side not even Destiny could intrude

even one of his fingers.

There, there, immortal dead one.

There, there.

[CE]

LXVIII

We’re at the fourteenth of July.

It’s five in the evening. It rains all throughout

some third corner of blotting paper.

And more it rains from below aye it does upward.

The hands two lagoons come forth

from ten at bottom,

of a murky Tuesday that for six days

has been frozen in lachrymals.

A week was beheaded

with the sharpest of drops; all’s been done

to make miserable swell

in great railingless bar. Now we are

okay, with this rain that cleanses

and pleases and graces us with subtlety.

We have at gross weight trudged, and, in sole

defiance,

our animal pureness whitened.

And we ask for eternal love,

for the absolute encounter,

for all that passes from here to there.

And we respond from where mine are not yours

from what an hour the coda, being carried on,

sustains and isn’t sustained. (Net.)

And it was black, hung in a corner,

without even uttering an iota, my paletot,

a

t

f

u

l

m

a

s

T⁵¹

[JM]

LXX

Everyone smiles at the nonchalance with which I sub-

merge⁵² to the bottom, cellular from foods aplenty and drinks ga-

lore.

Do suns get on bereft of viands? Or is there someone

who feeds them grain as if to birdies? Frankly,

I hardly know anything about this.

Oh stone, benefactory pillow at last. Let us the living

love the living, since it will for good dead things be

afterwards. So much must we love them

and pull them in, so much. Let us love the actuali-

ties, for we shan’t ever again be as we are.

For there aren’t interim Barrancos⁵³ in essential

cemeteries.

The payload goes in the upsurge, beak first. The journey clouts

us in the core, with its dozen stairways, scal-

ed, in the horizontifying⁵⁴ frustration of feet, in dread-

ed empty sandals.

And we shudder to step forth, for we know not whether

we knock into the pendulum, or already have crossed it.

[JM]

LXXI

Coils the sun does in your cool hand

and cautiously spills into your curiosity.

Quiet you. Nobody knows you’re in me

all throughout. Quiet you. Don’t breathe. Nobody

knows my succulent snack of unity:

legion of obscurities, Amazonians in tears.

Off go the wagons whippt⁵⁵ through evening,

and between them mine, facing back, at the fatal

reins of your fingers.

Your hands and my hands reciprocal offer

poles on guard, practicing depressions,

and temples and sides.

You too be quiet, Oh future twilight, pull yourself

together to laugh inwardly, at this rut

of red pepper gamecocks,

blinged out with cupola

blades, with cerulean widow halves.

Rejoice, orphan; drink your cup of water

at the bodega on any corner whatsoever.

[JM]

LXXIII

Another ay has triumphed. The truth is there.

And whoever acts that way, won’t he know

how to train excellent dijitigrades

for the mouse Yes … No …?

Another ay has triumphed and against no one.

Oh exosmosis of water chemically pure.

Ah my southerns. Oh our divines.

I have the right then

to be green and happy and dangerous, and to be

the chisel, what the coarse colossal block fears;

to make a false step and to my laughter.

Absurdity, only you are pure.

Absurdity, only facing you does this ex-

cess sweat golden pleasure.

[CE]

LXXV

You are dead.

What a weird way of being dead.

Anybody would say you’re not. But, really, you be

Dead.

You voidly float behind that membrane

which tick-tocking from zenith to nadir

journeys from sunset to sunset, throbbing before

the music box of a painless wound. I tell you,

then, that life is in the mirror, and that you are

Death. The original.

While the wave goes, while the wave comes,

with impunity one is dead. Only when

the waters burst upon the facing shores

curling and churning do you then transfigure

and, believing you’re dying, sense the sixth chord

that’s no longer yours.

You are dead, not having ever lived before.

Anyone would say, not being now, in another time

you were. But, really, you are the cadavers

come from a life that never was. Sad fate.

Not having been anything but dead, always.

To be a dry leaf, without ever having been green.

Orphanhood of orphanhoods.

And nonetheless the dead are not, cannot be

cadavers of a life they’ve not yet lived.

They died of life.

You are dead.

[SJL]

LXXVII

It hails so hard, as if to remind me

and increase the pearls

I’ve gathered from the same snout

of every tempest.

May this rain not dry up.

At least allow me now

to fall for her, or be buried

soaked in water

that will surge from all the fires.

How far until this rain will hit me?

I’m afraid of being left with one side dry;

afraid that she may leave, without having tasted me

in the droughts of incredible vocal chords,

through which,

to reach harmony,

one must always arise—never descend!

Don’t we in fact arise downward?

Rain, sing, on the coast still without a sea!

[JM]