many times his footsteps have cut over toward it,
then returned from some humble burial.
Today it’s a long time since my father went out!
A hubbub of kids breaks up.
Other times he would talk to my mother
about city life, politics;
today, supported by his distinguished cane
(which sounded better during his years in office),
my father is unknown, frail,
my father is a vesper.
He carries, brings, absentmindedly, relics, things,
memories, suggestions.
The placid morning accompanies him
with its white Sister of Charity wings.
This is an eternal day, an ingenuous, childlike,
choral, prayerful day;
time is crowned with doves
and the future is filled with
caravans of immortal roses.
Father, yet everything is still awakening;
it is January that sings, it is your love
that keeps resonating in Eternity.
You will laugh with your little ones,
and there will be a triumphant racket in the Void.
It will still be New Year. There will be empanadas;
and I will be hungry, when Mass is rung
in the pious bell tower by
the kind melic blind man with whom
my fresh schoolboy syllables, my rotund
innocence, chatted.
And when the morning full of grace,
from its breasts of time,
which are two renunciations, two advances of love
which stretch out and plead for infinity, eternal life,
sings, and lets fly plural Words,
tatters of your being,
at the edge of its white
Sister of Charity wings, oh! my father!
[CE]
________________
EPEXEGESIS25
I was born on a day
when God was sick.
Everybody knows that I am alive,
that I am bad; and they do not know
about the December of that January.
For I was born on a day
when God was sick.
There is a void
in my metaphysical air
that no one is going to touch:
the cloister of a silence
that spoke flush with fire.
I was born on a day
when God was sick.
Brother, listen, listen . . . . . . . . .
Okay. And do not let me leave
without bringing Decembers,
without leaving Januaries.
For I was born on a day
when God was sick.
Everybody knows that I am alive,
that I chew … And they do not know
why in my poetry galled winds,
untwisted from the inquisitive
Sphinx of the Desert,
screech an obscure
coffin anxiety.
Everybody knows … And they do not know
that the Light is consumptive,
and the Shadow fat . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And they do not know how the Mystery synthesizes . . . . . . . .
how it is the sad musical
humpback who denounces from afar
the meridional step from the limits to the Limits.
I was born on a day
when God was sick,
gravely.
[CE]
Articles and Chronicles
WITH MANUEL GONZÁLEZ PRADA
Lima, March 1918
The reading room of the library, as always, jam-packed.
Its peace, abstractive. One hand after another that impatiently thumbs through pages. The delayed footsteps of some conservative, scouring the stacks. Oil paintings of illustrious Peruvians on the walls get damaged by the light of the large old windows.
We walk in. To the board room. With a fine welcoming attitude, seated softly on the couch, as if he were auscultating the spiritual moment, the maestro drops words I never dreamed I’d hear.
His vigorous sentimental dynamism, captivating and absorbing; the fresh expression of his venerable continent’s spring, has something of soft winged marble in which the pagan Hellas used to incarnate divine gestures, the superhuman energy of its gods. I don’t know why, before this man, an extraordinary reverberation, a breath of centuries, an idea of synthesis, one like an emotion of unity comes together between my fibers. One could say his shoulders fly that legendary flight of an entire race, and on his snowy apostolic crown, the maximum spiritual prowess of one hemisphere bursts in beams of inextinguishable white light.
Moved, I look upon him; my heart beating faster than ever; my greatest mental energies shooting out and flying toward every horizon in a thousand shimmering
