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
