It is a Saying



Disquieted in the lips’ rings and its feelings
The words wash themselves like swords
Noble defenders of the woman in fallen marble
The tragic deliriums explode in fever
Or in an obelisk of high deeds

The landscape swells in riches
But there are attenuating circumstances
For summer seated in mid-year
More real than last year’s women
He is the beautiful tunic of the monastery
At the hour of descending the stairs and the light
       that rolls around the streetlamps
Like an unfastened mane
For the marble and its sleeping siren within
For time and its wounds

Vicente Huidobro

                   Nocturne of Saint Ildefonso




                                       1



Invent the night in my window
                                                 other night,
other space:
                   fiesta convulsed
in a squared black meter.
                                             Momentous
confederations of fire,
                                   nomad geometries,
errant numbers.
                         From yellow to green to red
the spiral unravels.
                             Window:
magnetized plate of call and response,
calligraphy of high voltage,
lying sky/industrial inferno
over the changing skin of the instant.

Signs-seeds:
                   night fires at them,
they rise,
               they explode upwards,
                                                 they hasten,
burned already,
                      in a shadow’s cone,
                                                     they reappear,
wandering brilliance,
                                cluster of syllables,
blazes gyrating,
                        they disperse,
                                             fragments again.
The city invents and annuls them.

I am at the entrance to a tunnel.
These phrases perforate time.
Perhaps I wait at the end of that tunnel.
I speak with my eyes shut.
                                         Someone
has planted in my eyelids
a forest of magnetic needles,
                                            someone
guides the thread of these words.
                                            The page
has become an anthill.
                                   The void
established itself in my stomach’s mouth.
                                                                     I fall
endlessly in this void.
                                              I fall without falling.
I’ve got cold hands,
                              cold feet
-- but the alphabet burns, burns.
                                                 Space
forms and unforms.
                               Night insists,
night touches my forehead,
                                         touches my thoughts.
Who loves?


                                     2



Empty streets, one-eyed lights.
                                                  In a corner
the specter of a dog.
                                Search, in the garbage,
a ghostly bone.
                        Rowdy cock pit:
neighborhood patio and its commotion.
                                              Mexico, toward 1931.
Stray sparrows,
                        a group of children
with magazines that didn’t sell
                                                 make a nest.
The street lamps invent,
                                     in the sun’s sorrow
unreal puddles of yellow light.
                                                Apparitions,
time opens itself:
                          a mournful foot-tapping, lascivious:
under a soot filled sky
                                  the blaze of a skirt.
C’est la mort -- ou la mort . . .
                                             The indifferent wind
pulls from the walls lacerated notices.
In this hour
                 the red walls of Saint Ildefonso
are black and they breathe:
                                        sun made time,
time made rock,
                         rock made flesh.
These streets were canals.
                                     To the sun,
houses were silver:
                             city of lime and song,
moon fallen in the lake.
                                    The latinos rose up
over the blinded canal and the buried idol,
another city
                  -- not white: pink and gold --
idea made space, tangible number.
                                                      They seated it
in the cross of eight directions,
                                                their doors open
to the invisible:
                        sky and inferno.
Sleeping neighborhood.
                        We walk through the galleries of echos,
among broken images:
                                       our history.
Quiet nation of rocks.
                                 Churches,
vegetation of domes,
                                 their facades
petrified gardens of symbols.
                                          Run aground
in the bitter proliferation of dwarf houses,
humbled palaces,
                           waterless fountains,
offended appearances.
                                Cumulus,
insubstantial white coral:
                                 they accumulate
over the grave piers,
                                defeated
not by the sorrow of the years,
but by opprobrium of the present.

                                  Zocalo plaza,
vast as a firmament:
                                  diaphanous space,
pediment of echos.
                               There we invent,
among Alyosha K. and Julien S.,
                                      signs of lightning
face of the century and its small rooms.
                                     They drag us,
the wind of thought,
                                  the verbal wind,
the wind that plays with mirrors,
                                  master of reflections,
builder of cities of air,
                                   geometries
suspended by the thread of reason.

                                            Giant earthworms:
yellow streetcars extinguished,
                                      Those and squad cars:
a crazed auto, insect of malignant eyes.
                                                                  Ideas,
fruit within the reach of a hand.
                                                 Fruits: stars.
Burn, gunpowder tree,
                                the adolescent dialog,
sudden scorched skeleton.
                                          12 times
knocked the bronze fist on the high towers.
                                                                  Night
explodes in pieces,
                          it joins them later and itself,
intact, unites.
                     We disperse,
not there in the plaza with its burning trains,
                                                                        here,
over this page:  petrified letters.



                                      3




The young man who walks through this poem,
between Ildefonso and Zocalo,
is the man who writes it:
                                       this page
is also a nocturnal hike.
                                              Here are embodied
spectral friends,
                       the ideas dissipate.
The good, we want the good:
                                              to make right the world.
We are not lacking integrity:
                                              we are lacking humility.
What we want we do not want with innocence.
Precepts and concepts,
                                 pride of theologians:
to beat with the cross,
                                    forged with blood,
to raise a house with small criminal bricks
to decree the obligatory communion.
                                          Some
become secretaries of secretaries
of the Secretary General of Hell.
                                              Rage
turns philosophic,
                        its babble has covered the planet.
Reason descends to earth,
takes the form of the gallows
                                          -- and millions adore it.
Circular entanglement:
                                     we have all been,
in the Great Theater of Filth,
judges, hangmen, victims, witnesses,
                                                     all
have raised false testimony
                                           against others
and against ourselves.
                                      And the most vile: we were
the public who applauded or yawned in its bustasa.
Guilt that knows nothing of guilt,
                                                      innocence,
the worst guilt.
                             Every year was a mountain of bones.

conversations, retractions, excommunications,
reconciliations, apostasies, abjurations,
zig-zag of demonolatry and androlatry
the bewitched and deviations:
my history
                    are histories in error?
History is error.
                           The truth is that,
beyond dates,
                            closer to names,  
history scorns:
                            each day
-- a people’s anonymous beatings,
                                                     unique
beatings --,
                        the unique day
identical to all days.
                                              The truth
is the depth of time without history.
                                               The weight
of the instant that has no weight:
                                                  some rocks with sun,
views already seen that today regress,
rocks of time that are also rocks
under this sun of time,
sun that comes one day without date,
                                                        sun
that illuminates these words,
                                                 sun of words
that extinguish upon naming.
                                                 Suns, words, rocks
burn and extinguish themselves:
                                                  the instance burns them
without burning itself.
                                    Occult, immobile, untouchable,
the present -- not its presences  -- is forever.

Between seeing and doing,
                                     action or contemplation,
I chose the act of words:
                                      form them, inhabit them,
give eyes to language.
                                     Poetry isn’t truth:
it’s the resurrection of presences,
                                                    history
transfigured in the truth of dateless time.
Poetry,
            like history, makes itself;
                                              poetry,
like truth, sees itself.
                                   Poetry:
                                              incarnation
of sun-over-rocks in a name,
                                            dissolution
of the name in a great beyond of rocks.

Poetry, bridge hanging between history and truth,
isn’t a road toward this or that:
                                                    it’s seeing
quietude in movement,
                                       the transit
in quietude.
                   History is the road:
it doesn’t lead to any destination,
                               we all walk it,
truth is walking it.
                                         We don’t come or go;
we are in the hands of time.
                                                  The truth:
to know us,
                  from the origin,
                                            suspended.
Fraternity over the void.
Ideas dissipate,
                          the specters remain:
truth of living and suffering.
An empty taste remains:
                                     time
-- furor shared --
                                     time
-- forgetting shared --
                                     at last transfigured
in memory and its incarnations.
                                                      There remains
time made body distributed :  language.

In the window,
                      warlike simulacrum,    
                                                    ignites and extinguishes
the commercial sky of announcements.
                                                                       Behind,
hardly visible,
                       truthful constellations.
There appears,
                      amongst water towers, antennas, terraced roofs,
liquid column,
                      more mental than corporeal,
waterfall of silence:
                               the moon.
                                              Neither phantasm nor idea:
it was a goddess and is today an errant clarity.
My wife is sleeping.
                               So is the moon,

                                 -- not between reefs of clouds,
between crags and sorrows of dreams:
there is also soul.
                  It flows under her closed eyes,
from her forehead she throws herself down,
                                                            silent torrent,

toward her feet
                    she collapses in herself
and from herself sprouts,
                                             her beatings sculpt her,
invite her to the journey,
                                        copies to invent herself

among the islands of her breasts
                                             is an arm of the sea,
her womb is a lagoon
                                  where the shadow and her vegetation
disappear,
                                                flow about her waist,
raise,
         descend,
                      scatter in her self,
                                                      she ties herself
to her flowing,
                  she disperses in her form:
and in her body.

                                        The truth
is the swelling of a breath
and the visions watched over by closed eyes:
palpable mystery of the person.
Night is at the point of overflowing.
                                             Brighten up.
The horizon has become aquatic.
                                      Throw yourself down
from the height of this hour:
                                        to die
it will be falling or climbing,
                         a sensation or a cessation?
I close my eyes,
                     I hear in my skull
the steps of my blood,
                                   I hear
the passing of time in my temples.
                                           I am still alive.
The room has run aground of the moon.
                                               Wife:
fountain in the night.
                           I fix myself in your flowing peace.


Octavio Paz
                   

       

               Your Childhood in Menton



                                                 Yes, your childhood: already fable of                                                               fountains.

                                                                                        Jorge Guillen


Yes, your childhood:  already fable of fountains.
The train and the woman who fills the sky.
Your elusive solitude in hotels
and your pure mask of another sign.
It’s the childhood of the sea and your silence
where wise glass shattered.
It’s your rigid ignorance where my torso
was limited by fire.
Norm of love I gave you, man of Apollo,
cry of the alienated nightingale,
but, pasture in ruins, you grow thin
in brief indecisive dreams.
Thought opposed, yesterday’s light,
indexes and signals of chance.
Your waist of sand without calm
attends only tracks that don’t rise.
But I have to search in corners
your tepid soul without you who isn’t understood,
with the pain of Apollo detained
where I’ve broken the mask you wear.
There, lion, there, fury of the sky,
I will leave you to graze in my cheeks;
there, blue horse of my madness,
pulse of nebula and the minute hand.
I have to search for scorpion rocks
and the dresses of your mother girl,
cry of midnight and cloth torn
that quits the moon of the dead man’s temple.
Yes, your childhood:  already fable of fountains.
Strange soul of my hollow of veins,
I have to search out the small one without roots.
Love of forever, love, love of never!
Oh, yes! I love. Love, love!  Let me be.
Don’t cover my mouth those who look for
ears of corn in Saturn by the snow
or that castrate animals in the sky,
clinic and jungle of anatomy.
Love, love, love. Childhood of the sea.
Your tepid soul without you who isn’t understood.
Love, love, flight of the doe
by the chest without end of its whiteness.
And your childhood, love, and your childhood.
The train and the woman who fills the sky.
Not you, nor I, nor the air, nor the leaves.
Yes, your childhood: already fable of fountains.


Federico Garcia Lorca

           
                        1910

                 (Intermission)





Those eyes of mine of nineteen-ten
didn’t see the burial of the dead,
nor the fiesta of ash cried over by the dawn,
nor the heart that trembles abandoned like a horse at sea.

Those eyes of mine of nineteen-ten
saw the white wall where the girls urinated,
the snout of the bull, the poisonous mushroom
and the incomprehensible moon that illumined in the corners
dried bits of lemon under the tough blackness of bottles.

Those eyes of mine in the pony’s neck,
in the pierced breast of Santa Rosa sleeping,
in the rooftops of love, with moans and fresh hands,
in a garden where cats were eating frogs.

Attic where old dust brings together statues and moss.
Boxes that keep the silence of devoured crab.
In the land where dream stumbles on its reality.
There my little eyes.

Don’t ask me anything.  I’ve seen that things
when they look for their course encounter its void.
There is a pain of hollows in the air without people
and in my eyes dressed creatures -- without nudity!


Federico Garcia Lorca

              Around the Block



Murdered by the sky.
Amid forms that edge toward the serpent
and forms that search out the crystal,
I will let my hair grow.

With the tree of stumps that doesn’t sing
and the child with the white face of an egg.

With the little animals of broken head
and the tattered water of dry feet.

With everyone who is tired deafmute
and the butterfly drowned in the inkwell.

Stumbling with my face distinct every day.
Murdered by the sky!


Federico Garcia Lorca

                      Office and Accusation




Under multiplications
there’s a drop of duck’s blood;
under divisions
there’s a drop of sailor’s blood;
under sums, a river of tender blood.
A river that comes singing
through the bedrooms of the suburbs,
and is silver, cement or breeze
in the false dawn of New York.
Mountains exist.  I know it.
And eyeglasses for wisdom.
I know it.  But I haven’t come to see the sky.
I’ve come to see the turgid blood,
the blood that carries machines to waterfalls
and the spirit to the cobra’s tongue.
Every day in New York they kill
four million ducks,
five million pigs,
two thousand doves for the pleasure of those dying,
a million cows,
a million lambs
and two million roosters
that leave the skies shattered to bits.

It’s better to cry sharpening the knife
or to kill dogs in an hallucinatory hunt,
than to resist in the dawn
the interminable trains of milk,
the interminable trains of blood
and the trains of roses handcuffed
by merchants of perfume.
The ducks and the doves
and the pigs and the lambs
place their drops of blood
under multiplications,
and the terrible howls of the crushed cows
fill the valley with pain
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.

I denounce all the people
who ignore the other half
the irredeemable half
that raises its mountains of cement
where the hearts of the little
animals beat who forget
and where we all will fall
in the ultimate fiesta of drills.

I spit in your face.
The other half hears me
devouring, urinating, flying in their purity
like children of porters
who carry fragile sticks
to the hollows where
the antennae of insects rust.
It isn’t hell, it’s the street.
It isn’t death.  It’s the fruit market.
There’s a world of broken rivers
and unreachable distances
in the paw of that cat broken by an automobile
and I hear the song of the earthworm
in the heart of many girls.
Rust, ferment, trembling earth.
Earth yourself who swims through the numbers
of the office.
What shall I do?  Command landscapes?
Command loves that later are photographs,
that later are pieces of wood and mouthfuls of blood?
No, no; I denounce.
I denounce the conspiracy
of these deserted offices
that don’t radiate agony,
that sweep away programs of the jungle
and I offer myself to be eaten by the crushed cows
whose cries fill the valley
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.


Federico Garcia Lorca

                 Theme of Fire and Sea




Only fire and the sea can watch each other
without end.  Not even the sky with its clouds.
Only your face, only the sea and fire.
Flames, waves, and your eyes.

You will be of fire and sea, eyes dark.
You will be of wave and flame, hair black.
You will know the outcome of the bonfire.
You will know the secret of the foam.

Crowned with blue like the wave.
Sharp and astral like the flame.
Only your interminable face.
Like fire and the sea.  Like death.

Eduardo Carranza

             To a Breaker of Horses



                               I



Four elements of war
   form the savage horse.
To break a colt is to command the force
   and the weight and the degree:
It is to knock down the vertical of fire
   and to praise the horizontal of water;
To put a brake on the air,
   two wings in the earth.
Strong breaker who harmonizes and plays
   the horse’s four strings!
(Four sounds in war
   form the savage colt.)
And he who raises a musician’s hands
   and puts them
   over the crate of fury
Can witness Harmony
   recently born
   in a honeycomb of tears.
Because breaking a colt
   is like tuning a guitar.


                                  II


Breaker of horses and friend who places
   no boundaries on friendship,
And man given to silence
   as to a precious wine!
Why will you come to me with the taste
   of ancient days,
Of ancient days open and closed
   like flowers?  

Do you come to reclaim the birth
   of a promised tribute,
   breaker of horses?

(Strings that I gave to the dead rekindle:
They recover in my hand the dangerous
   insomnia of music.)


                           III



Simple like metal, man’s metal,
   with the pure sound
   of a man and of a metal;
Dark and humbled,
   but visible still in the gold
   of an original nobility that lasts
   over your forehead;
Man without science, written
   from head to feet with laws
   and numbers, in the manner
   of faithful clay;
And wise in the degree
   of your faithfulness;
And so you come, friend without boundaries,
   and so we see you in the South:
And you harbor a moderate prudence
   in your kidneys.
And benevolence,
   like a flower of salt, in your glance
   you open for us, breaker.


                      IV

Edified late!
The immense curve of a celestial animal
   gives us the earth:
We are two men and a breaker of horses,
   placed in a musical trade.
Man given to silence as to a precious wine,
   you walk on ahead now:
In your forehead the noble custom of war
   has drawn a sign,
And the wisdom in your words
   unmoved by the wind.


                       V


What dark form trembles and resolves
   in front of us?
What choleric sheaf recovers
   your hand, breaker?
(Four sounds in war
   form the savage colt.)
We are two men and a breaker of horses,
   placed in a musical trade.
And the horse is handsome:  his flashing skin
   like night;
With the pulse of the sea, with the gracious
   turbulence of the sea;
Friend in the origin, and delivered to us
   in the purest day of its origin;
Made of movement, battle,
   and fatigue:  our sign.

The horse is handsome like a wind
   that would make itself visible;
But breaking the wind is more handsome still,
   And the breaker knows it!
And so we see him in the South:  rider
   of river and flame;
Seated in the storm
   of an animal that rises like fire,
   and disperses like living water;
His musical fingers affirmed
   in the sonorous crate
As he puts his attention on Harmony
    that is born of war, flower of war.



                          VI




And so we see him in the South.  And when
   vanquisher and without glory
He had stamped in the hot metal
   of the beast his seal and our arms,
Friend without shores!, we have seen him
   regress to silence,
Dark and humbled,
   but still visible the gold
   of an ancient royalty that doesn’t know
   how to die over his forehead.
His name:  Breaker of Horses, of the South.
Breaker of horses,
   there is no other praise.



Leopoldo Marechal

                         Love Nocturne



He who hears nothing in this pool of shadows
I don’t know how my arms won’t wound
in your breathing I follow the anguish of your crime
and you fall in the net that sleep spreads out for you
You keep the name of your accomplice in your eyes
but I encounter your eyelids tougher than silence
and before sharing it I would kill the pleasure
of submitting you to sleep with eyes closed
I suffer sensing the joy with which your body searches
the body that defeats you more than sleep
and I share the fever of your hands
with my hands of ice
and the trembling of your temples with my lost pulse
and the cast of my muscles with the skin of yours
that shadow corrupts with incurable leprosy
Already I know which is the sex of your mouth
and what guards the avarice of your armpit
and I curse the murmur that inundates the labyrinth of your ear
over the cushion of foam
over the hard page of snow
It is not the blood that flees from me as the arrow
flees from the bow
but the rage circulating through my arteries
yellow with fire in the middle of night
and all the words in the prison of the mouth
and a thirst that in a mirror’s water
quenches its thirst with an identical thirst
Of that night I awaken to this naked
large and cruel night that is no longer night
joined with your body more dead than dead
that isn’t your body now but its hollow
because the absence of your sleep has killed death
and my cold is so great that with a new heat
it opens my eyes where the shadow is harder
and clearer and lighter than light itself
and rekindles in me what hasn’t been
and is an unexpected pain and colder and full of flame
not being but the statue that awakens
in the bedroom of a world in which everything has died.


Xavier Villaurrutia

                             Poem XX



I can write the saddest verses tonight.

To write, for example:  “The night is starry,
and they shiver, blue, the heavenly bodies, far away.”

Night’s wind circles in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.
I loved her, and at times she loved me too.

In nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times beneath the infinite sky.

She loved me, at times I loved her too.
How not to have loved her great steady eyes!

I can write the saddest verses tonight.
To think that I don’t have her.  To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the verse falls in the soul as the dew in the grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her!
The night is starry and I am without her.

That is all. Far away someone sings.  Far away.
My soul is not content with having lost her.

As to near her my glance searches her out.
My heart looks for her, and I am without her.

The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, the rest of us, are no longer the same.

I don’t love her, it’s for sure, but how I loved her.
My voice searched for the wind to touch her hearing.

Of another.  She will be another.  As before of my kisses.
Her voice, her clear body.  Her infinite eyes.

I don’t love her, it’s for sure, but how I loved her.
Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.

Because in nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is not content with having lost her.

Even though this may be the last sorrow that she cause me,
and these may be the last verses that I write her.


Pablo Neruda

                            Not Even Dust




I don’t want to be who I am.  Cruel luck
Has provided me the nineteenth century,
The dirt and routine of Castille,
Repeated happenings, the morning
That, promising the day, gives us the vespers,
The sermon of the priest or the barber,
Solitude that goes leaving time behind
And an errant illiterate niece.
I am a man well on into his years.  A random
Page revealed to me unused voices
That searched for me, Amidas and Urganda.
I sold my earth and bought books
That thoroughly examined great undertakings:
The Grail, that received human blood
That the son spilled to save us,
The golden idol of Mohammed,
The irons, the battlements, the flags
And the operations of magic.
Christian horsemen roamed
The kingdoms of earth, vindicating
Offended honor or imposing
Justice with the edge of a sword.
May God that an employ restore
To our time that noble exercise.
My dreams watch over it.  I have felt it
At times in my sad celibate flesh.
I don’t even know its name.  I, Quijano,
Will be that paladin.  I will be my dream.
In this old house there is an ancient shield
And a leaf of Toledo
And a lance and truthful books
That at my arm promise victory.
At my arm?  My face (which I haven’t seen)
Doesn’t project a face in the mirror.
I am not even dust.  I am a dream
That intertwines sleep and vigilance
My brother and father, captain Cervantes,
Who fought in the seas of Lepanto
And knew some Castillians and something of the Arab . . .
So that I may dream of the other
Whose green memory will be part
Of the days of man, I implore you:
My God, my dreamer, go on dreaming me.


Jorge Luis Borges

                              Hymn




This morning
there is in the air the incredible fragrance
of the roses of Paradise.
On the border of the Euphrates
Adam discovers the freshness of water.
A rain of gold falls from the sky;
It is the love of Zeus.
A fish jumps from the sea
and a man from Agrigento will remember
having been that fish.
In the cavern whose name will be Altamira
a faceless hand traces the curve
of a bison’s back.
The slow hand of Virgil caresses
the silk that they bring
from the kingdom of the Yellow Emperor
in ships and caravans.
The first nightingale sings in Hungary.
Jesus sees the profile of Cesar on a coin.
Pythagoras reveals to his Greeks
that the form of time is that of a circle.
In an Oceanic island
silver greyhounds pursue the golden deer.
On an anvil they forge the sword
that will be faithful to Sigurd.
Whitman sings in Manhattan.
Homer is born in seven cities.
A maiden ceases hunting
the white unicorn.
The past returns like a wave
and those ancient things recur
because a woman has kissed you.


Jorge Luis Borges

                Nocturne and Elegy




If he asks for me, trace on the floor
a cross of silence and ash
over the impure name that I suffer.
If he asks for me, tell him I have died
and that I rot under an anthill.
Tell him that I’m an orange branch,
the simple weathervane of a tower.

Don’t tell him that I still cry
caressing the hollow of his absence
where his blind statue stays imprinted
as I await his body to return.
Flesh is a laurel that sings and suffers
and I will wait in vain under its shadow.
It’s already late.  I am a small mute fish.

If he asks for me give him these eyes,
these gray words, these fingers;
and the drop of blood on my handkerchief.
Tell him that I am lost, that I’ve become
a dark partridge, a false ring
at the bank of forgotten reeds:
tell him that I go from the saffron to the lily.

Tell him that I wanted to prolong his lips,
to inhabit the palace of his forehead.
To navigate a night in his hair.
To learn the color of his pupils
and extinguish myself smoothly in his chest,
sunken nightly, drowsy
in a murmur of veins and mutes.

Now I can’t see although I implore
the body that I wore in my affection.
A pink conch shell has come to me,
I stood immobile, broken, and detached.
If you doubt me believe in the wind,
look toward the North, ask the sky.
And they will tell you if I wait or darken.

Ah! If he asks tell him what you know.
Of me the olives will speak one day
when I am the eye of the moon,
unique over the forehead of the night,
divining shells of sand,
the nightingale suspended by a star
and the hypnotic love of the tides.

It’s true that I am sad, but I have
a smile planted in thyme,
I hid another smile in Saturn
and I don’t know where I’ve lost the other one.
It will be better if I wait until midnight,
for the lost odor of jasmine,
and in vigil of the roof, cold.

I don’t remember your selfless blood
nor that I placed thorns and worms
to bite your friendship of cloud and breeze.
I am not the ogre who spit in his water
nor he who pays in coin a tired love.
I am not he who frequents that house
presided over by a leech!

(There he goes with a bouquet of lilies
which an angel of turbid waves bleeds dry.)
I am not he who betrays the doves,
the children, the constellations . . .
I am a helpless green voice
who looks for and solicits its innocence
with the sweet whistle of a wounded shepherd.

I am a tree, the point of a needle,
a high equine gesture in balance;
the swallow crossing, the oiled
flight of an owl, the shock of a squirrel.
I am everything, minus that which
an index draws with mud on the walls
of brothels and cemeteries.

Everything, minus that which hides itself
under a dry mask of grass.
Everything, minus the flesh that procures
voluptuous serpent rings
encircling in a slow and viscous spiral.
I am that which you devote to me, which you invent
to bury my cry in the mist.

If he asks for me, tell him I inhabit
the acanthus and acacia leaf.
Or tell him, if you prefer, that I have died.
Give him my breath, my handkerchief;
my ghost in the nave of the mirror.
Perhaps I will cry in the laurel or search for
my remembrance in the form of a star.


Emilio Ballagas

               A Handful of Earth


                            I




A handful of earth
of your profound breadth;
of your height of perennial solitude;
of your forehead of clay
weighted down with germinal sobs.

A handful of earth,
with the simple caress of its salt
and its exposed sweetness of roots.

A handful of earth that holds in its lips
the smile and the blood of your dead.

A handful of earth
to bring closer to its ignited number
all the coldness that comes with death.

And some remnant of the shadow’s slow grove
keeps me watching over your sleeping eyelids.
I wanted from You your night of orange blossoms;
I wanted your hot and wooded meridian
I wanted the mineral nourishments that populate
the rough coasts of your buried body,
and I wanted the wood of your breast.

That’s what I wanted of You
-- Country of my joy and sorrow;
That’s what I wanted of You.



                                    II




Now I am naked anew.
Naked and desolate
over a precipice of memories;
lost between bends in the darkness.
Naked and desolate.
far from the steady symbol of your blood.
Far.

I no longer have the remote jasmine of your stars,
nor the nocturnal siege of your jungles.
Nothing: not your days of guitars and knives,
nor the forgetful clarity of your sky.

Alone like a rock or a cry
I name you and, when I search for
the return of your name’s glory
I know that Rock is rock and that river’s Water
flees from your wary waist and that birds
make use of lofty protection in the humbled trees
like a cliff face of their song and wings.



                            III




But here, walking, under distinct clouds;
over fabricated profiles of other towns,
suddenly, I recover you.

For between invincible solitudes,
or in blind alleys of music and wheatfields,
I find you stretched out at length by my side,
with your martyred crown and your clear
memory of Guaranias and oranges.

You are in me: you walk in my steps,
you speak in my throat; you raise up in my lime
and you die, when I die, every night.

You are in me with all your flags;
with your honest working hands
and your small irreplacable moon.

Inevitably
-- with the punctual constancy of constellations --
they come to me, present and earthly:
your hair a torrent of rains;
your seaward nostalgia and your immense
sorrow of thirsty plains.

You inhabit me and I inhabit you:
submerged in your wounds,
I watch over your forehead that, dying, awakens.

I am at peace with you;
neither ravens nor hatred
can make me shorten your waist:
I know that I carry your Root and your Sum
over the mountain range of my shoulders.

And that I have of You.
A handful of earth:
that’s what I wanted of you.


Herib Campos Cervera

             Small Litany in a Low Voice



I will choose a Rock.
And a Tree.
And a Cloud.
And I will shout your name
until the blind air that carries you
may hear me.
(In a low voice.)

I will beat on the small window of dew;
I will extend a rigging of hemp and resin;
I will raise your sailor’s canvass
to the First Wind of your Sign,
so that the Sea may name you.
(In a low voice.)

They cry for you: four birds;
a burden of children and puppets;
the nocturnal jasmine of a Paraguayan patio.
And a poet’s guitar.
(In a low voice.)

They call out to you:
all that is humble beneath the sky;
the innocence of a crumb of bread;
the handful of salt that spills out
over a poor man’s tablecloth;
the submissive glance of a horse,
and an abandoned dog.
And a letter.
(In a low voice.)

I also have called for you,
in my night of heights and orange blossoms.
(In a low voice.)

Only your solitude of now and forever
will call for you, night and day.
In a high voice.


Herib Campos Cervera

                            Only Death





There are singular cemeteries,
tombs filled with bones without sound,
the heart passing through a dark,
dark, dark tunnel,
like an internal shipwreck we die,
as we are drowning in the heart,
as we go falling from skin to soul.

There are cadavers,
there are feet of a cold alluring tombstone,
there is death in bones,
like a pure sound,
like a bark without a dog,
ringing from certain bells, from certain tombs
growing in the humidity of crying or rain.

I see, alone, at times,
coffins at sea
sailing with the  pallid deceased, with women
of moribund braids,
with bakers white like angels,
with thoughtful girls married to notaries,
coffins climbing the vertical river of death,
the purple river,
upwards, with sails swelling by the sound of death,
swelling by the silent sound of death.

Death arrives at the sonorous
like a shoe without a foot, like a suit without a man,
arrives to strike with a ring without rock or finger,
arrives to scream without mouth, without tongue, without throat.
Nevertheless its steps sound
and its raiments sound, quietly, like a tree.

I don’t know, I know little, I hardly see,
but I believe that its song is the color of humid violets,
of violets accustomed to the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the glance of death is green,
with the sharp humidity of a violet leaf
and its grave color of an exasperated Winter.

But death goes still about the world dressed in a broom,
licking the floor in search of the dead,
death is in the broom,
it’s the tongue of death looking for the dead,
it’s the needle of death looking for thread.
Death is in the cots:
in slow mattresses, in black blankets
it lives laid out, and suddenly breathes:
breathes a dark sound that swells sheets,
and there are beds navigating to a port
where it’s waiting, dressed like an admiral.


Pablo Neruda

                               Walking Around




It happens that I tire of being a man.
It happens that I enter the tailor’s and the cinema
withered, impenetrable, like a felt swan
navigating in a water of beginnings and ash.

The smell of hair salons makes me cry shouting.
I only want a respite of rocks or wool,
I only want to see neither establishments nor gardens,
nor merchants, nor eyeglasses, nor elevators.

It happens that I tire of my feet and my fingernails
and my hair and my shadow.
It happens that I tire of being a man.

Nevertheless it would be delicious
to frighten a notary with a cut lily
or to kill a monk with a blow to the ear.
It would be beautiful
to go through the streets with a green knife
and crying out until dying of cold.

I don’t want to go on being a root in the darkness,
vacillating, extended, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the wet stone walls of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating every day.

I don’t want to for my many misfortunes.
I don’t want to continue in root and tomb,
alone underground, in a bodega of the dead,
stiff with cold, dying of shame.

Because of this, Monday, this day, burns like oil
when it sees me arrive with my prison face,
and it howls in its passing like a wounded wheel,
leaving steps of hot blood for the night.

And it pushes me in certain corners, in certain humid houses,
in hospitals where bones fly out the window,
in certain shoemakers smelling of vinegar,
in horrifying streets like fissures.

There are sulfur colored birds and grotesque intestines
hanging from doors of houses I hate,
there are false teeth left in a coffee pot,
there are mirrors
that should have cried from shame and shock,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venom, and navels.

I walk by calmly, with eyes, with shoes,
with fury, with forgetting,
I walk by, I cross offices and orthopedists,
and patios where clothes hang from a wire:
underwear, towels and shirts that cry
slow dirty tears.


Pablo Neruda

                                Altazor


                             (fragments)



Altazor, why have you lost your prime serenity?
What wicked angel stopped at the door of your smile
Sword in hand?
Who scattered anguish in the plains of your eyes
like the adorning of a god?
Why one day did you suddenly feel the terror of living?
And in that voice that cried to you you live without
Seeing yourself living
Who converged your thoughts at the cross
Of all the winds of pain?

The diamond of your dreams ruptured in a lazy sea
You are lost, Altazor
Alone in the middle of the universe
Alone like a note that flourishes in the heights of the void
There are neither good nor evil nor truth nor order nor beauty

Where are you, Altazor?

The nebula of anguish passes like a river
And it drags me according to the law of attraction
The nebula in odors solidified flees its solitude
I sense a telescope pointing at me like a pistol
The tail of a comet whips my face flush with eternity
Searching untiring a quiet lake to refresh itself
In its unavoidable work
Altazor, you will die Your voice will dry up
and you will be invisible
The earth will follow gyrating in its precise orbit
Awe-inspiring stumbling like a tightrope walker
On a wire attracting gazes of dread

In vain you search for a maddened eye
There is no exit door and the wind displaces the planets
You think it doesn’t matter to fall eternally
if you can achieve escape?

Can’t you see you are already falling?
Erase from your mind morals and prejudice
And if wanting to arise you have attained nothing
Let yourself fall without halting your fall
Without fear at the depth of the shadow
Fearless at the enigma of yourself
Perhaps you may encounter a light without night
Lost in the fissures of cliffs

Fall
      Fall eternally
Fall to the depth of infinity
Fall to the depth of time
Fall to the depth of yourself
Fall as low as you can
Fall without vertigo
By means of all the spaces and all the ages
By means of all the souls and all the yearnings
Of all the shipwrecks
Fall and burn in passing stars and seas
Burn the eyes that watch you and the hearts that await you

Burn the wind with your voice
The wind entangled in your voice
And the cold night in in its cavern of bones

Fall in childhood
Fall in old age
Fall in tears
Fall in laughter
Fall in music of the universe
Fall from head to feet
Fall from feet to head
Fall from the sea to the fountain
Fall to the ultimate abyss of silence
Like the boat that sinks extinguishing its lights

All is finished


                              ***


I am Altazor
Altazor
Enclosed in the cage of destiny
In vain I grapple with bars of possible evasion
A flower seals the road
And raises itself like a statue of flames
Evasion impossible
I walk with my worries weaker
Than an army without light in the middle of an ambush

I opened my eyes in the century
In which Christianity would die
Twisted in its agonized cross
Already it will breathe its last breath
And what will we put in its empty space tomorrow?
We will place a dawn or a dusk
And is there something else?

The crown of thorns
Dripping its ultimate stars withers away
Christianity which hasn’t solved any problems will die

Having only taught dead prayers
Will die after two-thousand years of existence
An enormous bombardment has put a period on the Christian era
The Christ wants to die accompanied by millions of souls
Bury it with its temples
And walk over death with an immense retinue
A thousand airplanes salute the new era
They are the oracles and the flags

It’s been six months only since
I left the equatorial recently cut
In the warlike tomb of a patient slave
Crown of piety over human stupidity
It is I who is speaking in this year 1919
It is winter
Europe has buried all its dead
And a thousand tears form a single cross of snow
Look at those steppes that shake hands
Millions of workingmen have understood at last
And they raise to the skies their morning flags
Come come we await you because you are hope
The only hope
The last hope.


                                             (from Canto I)

Vicente Huidobro

                              Altazor


                          (fragments)




Enough, Senora, claw at the beautiful images
Of the furtive ones as illuminated
Another thing another thing we search for
We know how to place a kiss like a glance
To plant glances like trees
To cage in trees like birds
To water birds like helicopters
To play a helicopter like music
To empty music out like a sack
To behead a sack like a penguin
To cultivate penguins like vineyards
To milk a vineyard like a cow
To dismast cows like sailing ships
To comb a sailing ship like a comet
To disembark comets like tourists
To bewitch tourists like snakes
To harvest snakes like almonds
To strip naked an almond like an athlete
To cut down athletes like cypresses
To illuminate cypresses like streetlamps
To nest streetlamps like larks
To exhale larks like breaths
To embroider breaths like silk
To scatter silk like rivers
To hoist a river like a flag
To pluck a flag like a chicken
To extinguish a chicken like a fire
To row in fires like in seas
To reap seas like wheat
To ring wheat like bells
To bleed bells like lambs
To draw lambs like smiles
To bottle smiles like liquor
To mount liquor like gems
To electrify gems like dusk
To man dusk like ships
To strip shoes from ships like a king
To drape kings like auroras
To crucify auroras like prophets
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Enough Senor violin buried in a wave wave
Daily wave of miserable religion
From dream to dream possession of priceless jewels.


                                                              (from Canto III)

Vicente Huidobro

                       Wind Entire



The present is perpetual
The mountains are of bone and snow
They’ve been here since the beginning
The wind has finished birthing
                                             Without age
Like light and dust
                             Whirlpool of sound
The bazaar makes iridescent
                               Bells motors radios
The rocky trot of opaque donkeys
Songs and complaints entangled
In the merchants’ beards
Intense glow of hammer strikes sculpted
In the silent clearness
                                 Explode
The cries of children
                                 Princes in rags
On the bank of the tormented river
They pray urinate meditate
                                 The present is perpetual
They open the floodgates of the year
                                                     The day leaps
                 Agate
          The fallen bird
Between Montalambert and Bac street
A young woman
                         Is detained
Over a precipice of glances
If water is fire
                      Flame
In the center of the circular hour
                                                  Awestruck
         Sorrel colored mare
A bundle of sparks
                               A royal young woman
Between houses and spectral crowds
Streaming presence of evidence
I saw her by means of my unreal acts
I took her by the hand
                                  Together we cross
The four spaces and the three times
Small errant towns of reflections
And we return to the day of beginnings
The present is perpetual
                                    21st. of June
Summer begins today
                                    Two or three birds
Create a garden
                         You read and eat a peach
On a red quilt
                     Naked
Like wine in a glass pitcher
                      A great flight of ravens
In Santo Domingo our brothers expire
If there were a park you wouldn’t all be here
                       We gnaw at our elbows
In the gardens of your Summer fortress
Tipu Sultan planted the tree of the Jacobins
Later he distributed pieces of glass
Among official English prisoners
And ordained that they were to cut their foreskins
And to eat them
                         The century
Has ignited in our earths
With its fire
                   Burned hands
Builders of cathedrals and pyramids
Will raise their transparent houses
                   The present is perpetual
The sun has fallen asleep in your breasts
The red quilt is black and beating
Neither stars nor jewels
                                    Fruit
You are called date
                             Datia
Castle of salt if you like
                               Scarlet stain
On the heavy rock
Galleries terraces staircases
Dismantled nuptial rooms
Of the scorpion
                       Repetitious echoes
Erotic watchmakers
                        At the wrong hour
                                                  You look around
The quiet patios under the impious afternoon
Cloak of needles in your unharmed shoulders
If fire is water
                       You are a diaphanous drop
The royal young woman
                                  Transparency of the world
The present is perpetual
                                  The mountains
            Divided suns
Petrified ochre storm
                                The wind rips
              To see pain
The sky is another abyss, taller
Garganta de Salang
The black cloud over the black rock
The fist of pulsing blood
                                        Gates of stone
Only water is human
In these fallen solitudes
Your eyes alone of human water
                                                Below
In space split in two
Desire covers you with its two black wings
Your eyes open and close
                                         Phosphorescent animals
Below
       The hot gorge
The wave that dilates and breaks
                                                  Your open legs
The white leap
The foam of our abandoned bodies
                                                   The present is perpetual
The Muslim monk watered the tomb of the saint
His beard was whiter than the clouds  
Facing the just
                        At the flank of the storm
You repeated my name
                                   Dispersion of syllables
A green-eyed adolescent
Gave you a pomegranate
                                   At the other side of Amu-Darya
The small Russian house became humid
The sound of the Uzbek flute
Was another river, invisible and more pure
In the barge the boatman strangled chickens
The country is an open hand
                                            Its lines
       Signs of a broken alphabet
Skeletons of cows in the Bactrian plain
         Statue pulverized
I collect the dust of a handful of names
For those fallen syllables
Grains of an ashen pomegranate
I swear to be earth and wind
                                            I stir
Over your bones
                         The present is perpetual
The night enters with all its trees
Night of electric insects and thirsty beasts
Night of herbs that walk among the dead
Meeting of waters that come from afar
Murmurs
              Universes come undone
A world falls
                 A seed ignites
Every word beats
                           I hear you knocking in the shadow
Enigma in the form of a clock of sand
                                                           Woman asleep
Space animated spaces
Anima mundi
                     Maternal matters
Perpetual unearthing of the self
And falling perpetuity in his empty entrails
                                                        Anima mundi
Mother of errant races
                                        Of suns and men
Spaces emigrate
                         The present is perpetual
In the peak of the world Shiva
and Parvati caress each other
                 Each caress lasts a century
For the god and the man
                                     One similar time
The same falling away
                         Lahor
                                   Red river black boats
Between two tamarinds a girl goes barefoot
Watching without time
                        An identical pounding
Death and birth
Suspended between earth and sky
A few poplars
Vibrate from light more than their swaying of leaves
                                                        To climb or descend?
The present is perpetual
                                      It rains over my childhood
It rains over the fevered garden
Flint flowers or trees of smoke
In a leaf of the fig tree you navigate
For my forehead
                      The rain doesn’t touch you
You are the flame of water
                                      The diaphanous drop of fire
Spilled out over my eyelids
I see by means of my unreal acts  
The same day that begins
                                         Space gyrates
The world drags up its roots
Our outstretched bodies weigh less than the dawn.


Octavio Paz

                     Certainty



If it is real the white light
Of this lamp, real
The hand that writes, are they real
The eyes that watch what is written?

From one word to another
What I say vanishes.
I know that I live
Between two parentheses.

Octavio Paz

                  Here


My steps in this street
Resound
              In another street
Where
          I hear my steps
Passing in this street
Where

Only the mist is real


Octavio Paz

                           The Other



He invented a face.
                             Behind it
He lived, died, and came to life again
Many times.
                    His face
Today has wrinkles in that face.
His wrinkles have no face.

Octavio Paz

                  Small Town



The rocks are time
                             The wind
Centuries of wind
                      The trees are time
People are rock
                       The wind
Folds back on itself and is buried
In the day of rock

There is no water but eyes shine


Octavio Paz

                The Fire of Every Day


As the air
               forms and unforms
over pages of geometry,
over planetary mesas,
its invisible buildings:
                               man.
His language is hardly a grain,
though it burns,
                     in the palm of space.

Syllables are incandescences.
They also are plants:
                                   their roots
construct dwellings of sound.
                                            Syllables
entangle and disentangle,
                                     they play
at similarities and dissimilarities.

Syllables:
               mature in foreheads,
flourish in mouths.
                              Their roots
drink in the night, consume light.
                                        Languages:
incandescent trees
of foliage and rain.

Lightning strike vegetations,
geometries of echos:
over a sheet of paper
the poem forms
                        like the day
over the palm of space.

Octavio Paz

                  I See a Bee Going Around . . .





i see a bee going around this bee no longer exists
little fly with bright red pads as time and again your
      flight beats on
i incline my head lacking proof
i follow a string that marks at least a presence or
      a situation
i listen adorning the silence with incoming waves
that stir up turn over our confused echos as i sing
       in a high voice
stop, shadow of stars in the eyebrow of a man
      out for a walk
who carries on his back a frail golden woman
      mirror of herself
all is lost the weeks are shut in
i look conducting the wind with a secure proposal
like a flower which must scent the air
i open the quiet autumn i visit the sites of shipwrecks
in the depths of the sky birds appear like
       letters
and the dawn makes itself felt like the rind of a fruit
or perhaps you sink your feet somewhere else now
the day is of fire and it shores itself up in colors
the sea full of green clothes its saliva murmurs i am
      the sea
the stirring lured an uneasy crate
my soul is fresh with all my breathing
i suffocate beside antarctic nights
i put on the moon like a hyacinth flower knifewound
      of my sorrowful tear
here i am and this is my life with all my feet resembling each other
i turn a somersault i’m filled with transparent terror
i am alone in an exhibit without windows
without having to make discarded itineraries
i watch the walls fill themselves with snails like the sides
       of a boat,
absorbed deeply, i glue my face to them
following a clock not loving the night i wish it would pass
with snakeskin and lights
garland of the cold my belt twists itself in turn
i am the mare who galloped alone losing pursuit
       of the sad dawn
i accompany in my deafness an unceasing hollow
       trembling
the residents put to bed jump like rubber bands or fish
my wings absorb as a pavilion some forgotten park
and the ports threaten us like abandoned horseshoes
oh it surprises me song of the delirious carp
like a tightrope walker in love or the first fisherman
poor man, who, isolated, shivers like a drop,
a square of time strictly immobile


Pablo Neruda

               Urban Apparition




Did he surge from the earth?
Did he fall from the sky?
He stood among sounds,
wounded,
immobile,
in silence,
buried before the afternoon,
before the inevitable,
his veins attached
to shock,
to asphalt,
with his partings fallen,
with his saintly eyes,
everything, everything naked,
almost blue, of such whiteness.

They spoke of a horse.
I believe it was an angel.


Oliverio Girondo

           Reunion Under the New Flags



Who has lied?  The foot of the lily
broken, unfathomable, darkened, replete
with wounds and dark splendor!
Everything, the norm of wave upon wave upon wave,
the imprecise amber tomb
and the rugged spots of the wheat stalk!
I melted my chest in this, I listened to
the mournful salt, by night
I went planting my roots:
I came upon the bitterness of the earth:
It was all for my night or the lightning strike:
quota of secret wax in my head
and the spilling out of ashes in my footsteps.

And for whom did I search this cold pulse
but for death?
And what instrument did I lose in the abandoned
darkness, where no one hears me?
No,
             it was already time, flee,
shadows of blood,
icy star, recede to the step of human steps
and bid goodbye to my feet black shadow!

Of men like me I’ve got the same wounded hand,
I sustain the same red cup
and the same enraged amazement:
                                    one day
beating with human dreams a savage
steed arrived
at my devouring night
so that I could join my wolf steps
with those of man.
                                  And so, reunited,
stubbornly central, I don’t look for asylum
in the hollows of sobbing:  I display
the bee’s trunk:  radiant bread
for the man’s child:  in the mystery the blue
prepares itself
for watching over a wheat stalk leagues from blood.

Where is your place in the rose?
Where is your starry eyelid?
Have you forgotten those sweaty fingers
that go mad reaching for the sand?
                                     Peace for you, shadowed sun,
peace for you, forehead blind,
there’s a burning space for you along the way,
there are rocks without mystery in the roads,
there are silences of jail like an inflamed star,
naked, out of control, thinking of hell.

Together against the wailing!
                         It’s the high hour
for earth and perfume, look at this face
just escaped from the awful salt,
look at this bitter mouth that smiles,
look at this new heart who salutes you
with its extravagant flower, golden and determined.


Pablo Neruda

                                 Barcarole




If only you will touch my heart,
if only you would put your mouth in my heart,
your fine mouth, your teeth,
if you would place your tongue like a red arrow
there where my dusky heart beats,
if you will breathe in my heart, next to the sea, crying,
it would sound with a dark echo; with the sound
of tired train wheels,
like vacillating waters,
like leaves in Autumn,
like blood,
with a sound of humid flames burning the sky,
sounding like dreams or branches or rain,
or horns of a sad port;
if you will breathe in my heart, next to the sea,
like a white ghost,
at the border of foam,
in the middle of wind,
like an unchained ghost, at the banks of the sea, crying.

Like an absence extended, like a sudden bell,
the sea shares the sound of the heart,
raining, darkening, in one coast alone,
night falls without doubt,
and its gloomy blue in the banner of a shipwreck
populates planets of hoarse silver.

And the heart sounds like a bitter snail,
come, oh sea, oh lament, oh molten fright
scattered in misfortunes and rickety waves.

If you would exist suddenly, on a gloomy coast
circled by the dying day,
facing a new night,
full of waves,
and you will breathe in my heart cold with fear,
you will breathe in the flight of a flaming dove,
they would sound their black syllables of blood,
they would grow their incessant red waters,
and I would sound, I would sound in shadows,
I would sound like death,
I would call like a tube filled with wind or sobs
or a bottle spraying shock in gushes.

So it is, and the lightning would cover your braids
and the rain would come in through your open eyes
to prepare the cry that you deafly envelop,
and the black waves of the sea will gyrate around
you, with great claws, and squawks, and flight.

Do you want to be a ghost who breathes, alone,
next to the sea its sterile, sad instrument?
If only you will call,
your prolonged sound, your wicked whistle,
your order of wounded waves,
someone would come,
someone would,
from the heights of islands, from the red depth
of the sea,
someone would come, someone would come.

Someone would come, breathing with fury,
resounding like the siren of a broken boat,
like a lament,
like a neighing amid foam and blood,
like a ferocious water sounding and biting itself.

In the marine season
its snail-shadow gyrates like a shout,
the seabirds look down on it and flee,
their list of sounds, their gloomy jails
stand up to the shores of the lone ocean.


Pablo Neruda