swings of street fairs. Hone down your hearts! Justice passes beneath every surface, behind everyone’s backs. Lend subtler an ear to its fatal drumroll, and you will hear its only vigrant cymbal that, by the power of love, is smashed in two—its cymbal as vague and uncertain as the traces of the crime itself or of what is generally called crime.
Only in this way is justice infallible: when it’s not seen through the tinted enticements of the judges, when it’s not written in the codes, when there’s no longer a need for jails or guards.
Therefore, justice is not, cannot be, carried out by men, not even before the eyes of men.
No one is ever a criminal. Or we all are always criminals.
[JM]
________________
ANTARCTIC WALL
Desire magnetizes us.
She, at my side, in the bedchamber, charges and charges the mysterious circuit with volts by the thousand per second. There’s an unimaginable drop that drips and pools and burns wherever I turn, trying to escape; a drop that’s nowhere and trembles, sings, cries, wails through all five senses and my heart, and then finally flows like electrical current to the tips …
I quickly sit up, leap toward the fallen woman, who kindly confided in me her warm welcome, and then … a warm drop that splashes on my skin, separates me from my sister, who stays back in the environs of the dream that I wake up from overwhelmed.
Gasping for breath, confused, bullish my temples, it pierces my heart with pain.
Two … Three … Foooooouuuuur! … Only the angry guards’ voices reach the dungeon’s sepulchral gloom. The cathedral clock tolls two in the morning.
Why with my sister? Why with her, who now must surely be sleeping in a mild innocent calm? Why did it have to be her?
I roll over in bed. Strange perspectives resume their movements in the darkness, fuzzy specters. I hear the rain begin to fall.
Why with my sister? I think I’m running a fever. I’m suffering.
And now I hear my own breathing rise, fall, collide, and graze the pillow. Is it my breathing? Some cartilaginous breath of an invisible death appears to mix with mine, descending perhaps from a pulmonary system of Suns and then, with its sweaty self, permeating the first of the earth’s pores. And that old-timer who suddenly stops yelling? What’s he going to do? Ah! He turns toward a young Franciscan who rises up from his imperial dawn-ward genuflection, as if facing a crumbling altar. The old man walks up to him and, with an angry expression, tears off the wide-cut sacred habit that the priest was wearing … I turn my head. Ah, immense palpitating cone of darkness, at whose distant nebulous vortex, at whose final frontier, a naked woman in the living flesh is glowing! …
Oh woman! Let us love each other to the nth degree. Let us be scorched by every crucible. Let us be cleansed by all the storms. Let us unite in body and soul. Let us love each other absolutely, through every death.
Oh flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone! Do you recall those budding passions, those bandaged anxieties of our eight years? Remember that spring morning warmed by the sierra’s spontaneous sun, when, having played so late the night before, we, in our shared bed sleeping late, awoke in each other’s arms and, after realizing that we were alone, shared a nude kiss on our virgin lips. Remember that your flesh and mine were magnetized, our friction course and blind; and also remember that we were thenceforth still good and pure and that ours was the impalpable pureness of animals …
Oneself the end of our departure; oneself the alvine equator of our mischief, you in the front, I behind. We have loved each other—don’t you recall?—when the minute had yet to become a lifetime. In the world we’ve come to see ourselves through lovers’ eyes after the bleakness of an absence.
Oh, Lady Supreme! Wipe from your bona fide eyes the blinding dust kicked up on winding roads and tergiversate your concrete climb. And rise higher even still! Be the complete woman, the entire chord! Oh flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone! … Oh my sister, my wife, my mother!
And I break down into tears until dawn.
“Good morning, Mr. Mayor …”
[JM]
________________
EAST WALL
Wait. I can’t figure out how to get this going. Wait. Now.
Aim here, right where the tip of my left hand’s longest finger is touching. Don’t back down, don’t be afraid. Just aim here. Now!
Vrrrooommm …
So, now a projectile bathes in the waters of the four pumps that have just combusted in my chest. The recoil sears and burns. Thirst ominously saharangues my throat and devours my gut …
Yet I hear three lonely sounds bombard and completely dominate two ports and their three-boned piers that, oh, are always just a hair shy of sinking. I perceive those tragic and thricey sounds quite distinctively, almost one by one.
The first comes from one errant strand of hair still mincing upon the thick tongue of night.
The second sound is a bud, an eternal self-revelation, an endless announcement. It’s a herald. It constantly circles a tender ovoid waist like a hand carved from a shell. Thus it always appears and can never blow past the last wind. So it’s ever-beginning, the sound of all humanity.
The final sound. The one final sound watches over with precision, pedestyled in the clearing of those communicating vessels. In this final blow of harmony, thirst dissipates (one of threat’s little windows slams shut) and acquires a different sensation, becomes what it was not, until it reaches the counter key.
And the projectile in the blood of my stranded heart
used to sing
to make plumes
in vain has forced its way in order to put me to death.
“And so?”
“This is the one I’ve got to sign twice, Mr. Scribe. Is it in duplicate?”
[SJL/JM]
________________
DOUBLEWIDE WALL
On this swelter of a night, one of my inmates tells me the story of his trial. He finishes the abstruse narration, stretches out on his soiled cot, and hums a yaraví.
I now possess the truth of his conduct.
This man is a criminal. His mask of innocence transparent, the criminal has been arrested. Through the course of his prattle, my soul has followed him, step-by-step, through his unlawful act. Between us we’ve festered through days and nights of idleness, garnished with arrogant alcohol, chuckling dentures, aching guitar strings, razor blades on guard, drunken bouts of sweat and disgust. We’ve disputed with the defenseless companion who cries for her man to quit drinking, to work and earn some dough for the kids, so that God sees … And then, with our dried-out guts thriving on booze, each dawn we’d take the brutal plunge into the street, slamming the door on the groaning offspring’s own fat lips.
I’ve
