under the dark night;
as if below, below,
in an open grave’s
muddy gravel eye,
celebrating perpetual funerals,
fantastic daggers were shattering.
It’s raining … raining … The downpour condenses,
reducing itself to funereal odors,
the mood of ancient camphors
that hold vigil tahuashando15 down the path
with their ponchos of ice and no sombreros.
[CE]
________________
AUTOCHTHONOUS TERCET
I
The laborer fist velvetizes
and outlines itself as a cross on every lip.
It’s feast day! The plow’s rhythm takes wing;
and every cowbell is a bronze precentor.
What’s crude is sharpened. Talk pouched …
In indigenous veins gleams
a yaraví16 of blood filtered
through pupils into nostalgias of sun.
Quenaing17 deep sighs, the Pallas,18
as in rare century-old prints, enrosarize
a symbol in their gyrations.
On his throne the Apostle shines, then;
and he is, amid incense, tapers, and songs,
a modern sun-god for the peasant.
II
The sad Indian is living it up.
The crowd heads toward the resplendent altar.
The eye of twilight desists
from watching the hamlet burned alive.
The shepherdess wears wool and sandals,
with pleats of candor in her finery;
and in her humbleness of sad and heroic wool,
her feral white heart is a tuft of flax.
Amid the music, Bengal lights,
an accordion sol-fas! A shopkeeper
shouts to the wind: “Nobody can match that!”
The floating sparks—lovely and charming—
are wheats of audacious gold sown by
the farmer in the skies and in the nebulae.
III
Daybreak. The chicha finally explodes
into sobs, lust, fistfights;
amid the odors of urine and pepper
a wandering drunk traces a thousand scrawls.
“Tomorrow when I go away …” a rural
Romeo bewails, singing at times.
Now there is early-riser soup for sale;
and an aperitive sound of clinking plates.
Three women go by … an urchin whistles … Distantly
the river flows along drunkenly, singing and weeping
prehistories of water, olden times.
And as a caja from Tayanga19 sounds,
as if initiating a blue huaino,20 Dawn
tucks up her saffron-colored calves.
[CE]
________________
HUACO
I am the blind corequenque
who sees through the lens of a wound,
and who is bound to the Globe
as to a stupendous huaco spinning.
I am the llama, whose hostile stupidity
is only grasped when sheared by
volutes of a bugle,
volutes of a bugle glittering with disgust
and bronzed with an old yaraví.
I am the fledgling condor plucked
by a Latin harquebus;
and flush with humanity I float in the Andes
like an everlasting Lazarus of light.
I am Incan grace, gnawing at itself
in golden coricanchas21 baptized
with phosphates of error and hemlock.
At times the shattered nerves of an extinct puma
rear up in my stones.
A ferment of Sun;
year of darkness and the heart!
[CE]
________________
DEAD IDYLL
What would she be doing now, my sweet Andean Rita
of rush and tawny berry;
now when Byzantium asphyxiates me, and my blood
dozes, like thin cognac, inside of me.
Where would her hands, that showing contrition
ironed in the afternoon whitenesses yet to come,
be now, in this rain that deprives me of
my desire to live.
What has become of her flannel skirt; of her
toil; of her
