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