vale of tears, into which
I never asked to be led.
Resting on my elbows,
all bathed in tears, I repeat head bowed
and defeated: how much longer will this supper last.
There’s someone who has drunk too much, and he mocks us,
and offers and withdraws from us—like a black spoonful
of bitter human essence—the tomb …
And this abstruse one knows
even less how much longer this supper will last!
[CE]
________________
THE ETERNAL DICE
FOR MANUEL GONZÁLEZ PRADA,
this wild, choice emotion, one for
which the great master has most
enthusiastically applauded me.
My God, I am crying over the being I live;
it grieves me to have taken your bread;
but this poor thinking clay
is no scab fermented in your side:
you do not have Marys who leave you!
My God, had you been a man,
today you would know how to be God;
but you, who were always fine,
feel nothing for your own creation.
Indeed, man suffers you; God is he!
Today there are candles in my sorcerer eyes,
as in those of a condemned man—
my God, you will light all of your candles
and we will play with the old die …
Perhaps, oh gambler, throwing for the fate of
the whole universe,
Death’s dark-circled eyes will come up,
like two funereal snake eyes of mud.
My God, and this deaf, gloomy night,
you will not be able to gamble, for the Earth
is a worn die now rounded from
rolling at random,
it cannot stop but in a hollow,
the hollow of an immense tomb.
[CE]
________________
DISTANT FOOTSTEPS
My father is asleep. His august face
expresses a peaceful heart;
he is now so sweet …
if there is anything bitter in him, it must be me.
There is loneliness in the house; there is prayer;
and no news of the children today.
My father stirs, sounding
the flight into Egypt, the styptic farewell.
He is now so near;
if there is anything distant in him, it must be me.
My mother walks in the orchard,
savoring a savor now without savor.
She is so soft,
so wing, so gone, so love.
There is loneliness in the house with no bustle,
no news, no green, no childhood.
And if there is something broken this afternoon,
something that descends and that creaks,
it is two old white, curved roads.
Down them my heart makes its way on foot.
[CE]
________________
TO MY BROTHER MIGUEL
In memoriam
Brother, today I am on the stone bench by the door,
where we miss you terribly!
I recall how we would play at this hour, and Mama
would caress us: “Now, boys …”
Now I go hide,
as before, all those evening
prayers, and hope you do not find me.
Through the living room, the hall, the corridors.
Then, you hide, and I cannot find you.
I recall that we made each other cry,
brother, with that game.
Miguel, you hid
one night in August, at dawn;
but, instead of hiding laughing, you were sad.
And your twin heart of those extinct
evenings has grown weary from not finding you. And now
shadow falls into the soul.
Hey, brother, don’t take so long
to come out. Okay? Mama might get worried.
[CE]
________________
JANUNEID24
My father can hardly,
in the bird-borne morning, get
his seventy-eight years, his seventy-eight
winter branches, out into the sunlight.
The Santiago graveyard, anointed
with Happy New Year, is in view.
