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POEMS IN TRANSLATION

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Anniversary of a Vision (1960)

To the image that kindled the lost, the hidden fires

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I

	The floating world is lost, and the whole of life catches in the spring light of your looking,
	—and while you repeat yourself in the echo, horizon bound in smoke, I regard your departure,
	clear substance and hope dehiscing into distannnce:
	you live on that sweetness when beauty, sorrowing, glances your way,
	and you emerge in half-profile
	to the iron ringing of nighttime instruments, golden and blue, a music shining and throbbing and taking wing
	in the hollow of my heart.

	I don't dare look at you lest I not be inside you, and I don't praise you lest joy steal away
	—I'm content just to watch you, and you know this and pretend not to look at me and you bounce around, exaggerating everything with divine insight,
	as if you were riding a horse or a motorcycle
	—your extravagance amazes me, drills joy into me, it is my daily bread
	—when it rains, at a turn of the head, shouts fly from your shoulders,
	and you stroke your cheeks and your applause echoes in the water, in the wind, and in the fog
	—it amazes me how much I love you!
	I yearn for you the moment I hear you,
	a sepulchral music vanishes and my death steps out of you,
	beloved images become visible to the musicians
	when it's you who is listening
	—always, the musicians exult in silence
	when it's you who is listening.

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II

	Your crossing the streets separates you from me, as the day and the streets are separate
	—the whole city is a spider that hoards you from me,
	and the light cuts you off; it isolates you and makes me see how well it cocoons you
	—resplendent, your happiness on the street corners,
	at grief 's hour I ask myself if I will find that sublime, deep blue of your garments,
	my nation,
	the air of your voice when evening falls
	—and I ask myself why I would joyously surrender to the joy you kindle in me
	Your likeness to me is not to be met in you, in me, nor in my likeness to you
	but in a line randomly traced and made unforgettable by forgetfulness
	—and in the scent rising from certain drawings that make us weep
	and which at the same time enliven us,
	because your stunning vision is a disquiet to the flavor of memories,
	that gentle testimony left by youth of its leaving:
	hidden image,
	taste of youth waiting to blend with the hour of death which is your form walking in light and love through the days and the nights and the years only to gash my heart
	—my death will have absconded with your gaze, because it reached inside you when you searched it out
	though it is wrapped within you and remains there;
	let me name for you its raiment,
	youth will endure in you.

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III

	You exaggerate without exaggerating because you know that my exaggerations make you exaggerate,
	and my exaggerations are invisible so that your exaggerations may be visible, not only for this age,
	and in such subtle manner I add my grain of sand to the discovery of a cure for love's malady
	—still, I'm alone and bewildered, and need succor in the face of this spasm of exaggerations which announce a kind of chaotic glee
	—and I don't know if it's you or the devil who bewilders me and makes me see what is not seen
	and live a life that is neither life nor dream, but fear—a fear of dreaming what my soul doesn't know,
	a miracle of tenderness and truth transformed into joke when at a butterfly's flight I burst into lament
	and seeking life and meaning, my struggles and penuries ended up as farce
	—because I didn't know we were supposed to impersonate others, being who we are,
	and we are not what we are, nor do we seem to be what we are,
	rather you and I will be, and I will be you also and you will be me,
	solely through the grace of imposture
	—and, moreover, now I have come to find that love is nothing other than what is hidden in love;
	and to find it, I will have to transgress what I believe myself to be, which is to say you, and come to be you, which is to say me
	(in reality, you are because I think, and you are the true reality)
	—and you will do the same,
	yet don't sigh, don't go here and there,
	but where the gaze is firm and sighs are real,
― 8 ―
	and where a wild bull charges at the mystery
	which will unbaptize that it may baptize,
	and which will truly name you—from the inside, and not from without.

IV

	There being a miracle, there is none; and I call out for the word's effacement, the threading of kingdoms and communication through the eyes, the return to the soul—you will perish.
	and no one will have seen your soul except me;
	and you, on the other hand, don't even see my face, although I recognize yours in the throng,
	when you don't recognize me you believe I believe I'm a flea, and that I ignore that I know you and believe I believe as you;
	but you should know that were I in fact a flea, even if you looked at me I wouldn't know at whom you looked, and I would look at you without feeling or understanding the wherefore
	—and so, if I am as I was born, it is due to terror, whose son I am; because it would not have been out of the question to be born a flea—and of that there's no doubt, apparently;
	and later, I can wail, as I can wail, and seek the cure to a malady that afflicts not me, but you,
	someone who, in believing himself to be who he is not, looks at me, as though I were what he is, while still being me,
	who looks at himself, but not at me, since in truth it is I who believe he looks at me,
	when he doesn't look at me, because of my looking at him:
	so to say, I am I and you are you, and I look at you and for that reason believe
― 9 ―
	that you look at me, and you don't look at me but believe you do every time you look at me,
	except that I don't look at myself but believe I do, looking at you,
	which is to say, I am not I and you are not you but I;
	in a word: there is and there is not communication; and you don't exist, and I cease to exist in concerning myself with you, since I leave myself so that you may exist
	—in conclusion, I'm telling you that this is the tone to use to penetrate matters of love—a dark thing,
	for whose explanation the tone will need to be dark, but not lucid;
	and I say that common sense only serves to explain itself to itself
	for in common sense's tone, you become entombed in your own common sense, believing you've managed to make sense of what you wanted;
	dark, very dark the tone must be, if what is hidden in love is to be unleashed;
	and the darkness of the tone in the illumination of my farewell from you shall be great indeed,
	when I find myself as a body without a body and without you, an aerolite for lack of you,
	without the silence of your eyes, without the vision the parting of your lips verged on revealing to me
	and without the voyage and the arrival of dream and of light, which enfolded you already to bring you in fullness to me
	—who knows with what gestures, with what somersaults I would have greeted your enchanted apparition!
	—and while I wait years for you and keep myself from living
	and wait for you a minute and live in a rush,
	I would wish for the moon's eclipse just to see my last illusions of kissing you come true,
	it wouldn't matter if half a kiss or no kiss at all and in the flash of darkness or of light
― 10 ―
	—and my hope, beneath your gaze,
	would be the real life I see in the deepness of your eyes.

V

	In sight of the river, which cleanses the inhabitants of their morbidity and keeps them alert,
	and which erodes the thin cortex suspending the city, beneath which a great abyss is hidden,
	—I won't address myself to you for a moment, while I long to linger in what you inhabit and what inhabits you—as it does me,
	and make out death's long, anguilliform shape in the strong, wet structure of its crystal dwelling,
	and recognize the way of being and not being of death, which knows how to grow downward from above
	—I want to discover why we feel that we move, in what space, in what place, in what distance movement moves in stillness,
	where movement seeks out a going from one place to the next without needing to go, and seeks to find itself within immobility and within itself,
	like the surface of this river and like its waters, languidly flowing along with us,
	to flow out to the sea, to immerse us and deliver us from not dying through the absence of death,
	which a moment ago was oblivious to our lives,
	and which now perches in them, then veers off and away.

	The river rushes by thunderous and deaf!—it slides and leaps across the dikes, at its roar, visions of huge animals incandesce,
― 11 ―
	the ones we see when, in solitude, we release a strange sadness,
	in the transparency and forgetfulness of sighs which the river deepens and intensifies in the midst of mephitic emanations,
	and to the hissing of pure air filtered by Mt. Illimani
	which blows over our troubles, our impulsiveness,
	those visions battle among sighs and search in the churning waters for a vision that will envision them and sigh,
	and while we breathe the essence of this vast air, filtered, cold, and blue,
	at the shadow hour, penetrated to the quick, the mephitic emanations carry us off to sea,
	and dilute us in the roundness of the earth and in an eminence of sky
	—I search for you,
	and with the dawn and with sighs,
	with the clarity of stars the city rises up
	—and the river rushes by, disconsolate, and remains.

VI

	In the lavish, vaporous light
	and in the mountains' ethereal air,
	in transparency's solitary immensities and in the columns of smoke, to the fleeting warmth of the world's somber curving,
	—in the streets and in the trees,
	the rain reflects the quiet tenderness of your vision.

	And out of the graves a sigh sparks the lost and hidden fires
	in your charged image,
― 12 ―
	to the ascension of that melancholic breath, from the darknesses,
	which has ripped open the shrouds of your murmuring ancestors
	—and in the bowels of the water, to the measure I hear in oblivion, it rains,
	and it rains and I don't look at you; in reality I can see that you look at me,
	—how you look at me!
	from some outer reaches of childhood
	and from the fathomless seas of youth
	—you look at me in emptiness and across the vast,
	how your gaze arrives, from such remoteness and in so moving a way
	that it makes me realize I don't look at you!
	—and a deep sobbing shakes from me the yearning to meet you,
	and talk with you about gratitude, about spring and joy
	and about so many other things,
	at the same time, I hear you—in the mark on my brow, in a shadow grazing the
	wall—
	I hear you speaking of everything that makes me cry
	—and this is how you answer what I speak in my heart.

VII

	May your stay be long beneath the brilliance of the stars
	I leave in your hands my time
	—the rain's time
	will perfume your presence, resplendent, in the thicket.

	I renounce happiness, I renounce you: you are my soul's body; stay
	—I have gone beyond the twilight and the dross to arrive at the gentle light
	of your eyes
― 13 ―
	and I bury myself in the darkness;
	look at no one,
	don't open the window. Don't move:
	make me know the gesture that, in silence, the breeze broadcasts from your mouth:
	I am in your memory; make me know if your hands caress me
	and if through them the foliage is breathing
	—make me know the rain that falls on your secret body,
	and whether it is the penumbra that veils it or the night's spirit.

	Make me know, lost and vanished vision, what it was your gaze kept cloistered from me
	—if it was the desired and secret gift
	that my life waited all its life for death to receive.

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From As the Comet Passes
(1970–1972)

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High above the Dark City

	One night on a rain-glistened road high above the dark city
	with its now-distant tumult
	she will certainly sigh
	I will sigh
	holding hands a long time within the grove
	her eyes clear as the comet passes
	—her face come from the sea her eyes in the sky my voice inside her voice
	her mouth in the shape of an apple her hair in the shape of a dream
	in each pupil a look never seen
	her eyelashes a trail of light a torrent of fire
	everything will be mine somersaulting with gladness
	I'll cut off a hand for each of her sighs I'll gouge out an eye for each smile
	I'll die once twice three times four times a thousand times
	just to expire on her lips
	with a saw I'll hack through my ribs to hand her my heart
	with a needle I'll draw out my sweetest soul to surprise her
	on Friday evenings
	with the night air singing a song I propose to live for three hundred years
	in the loveliness of her company.

Your Skull

for Silvia Natalia Rivera

	These rains,
	I don't know why they would make me crave a dream I had, many years back,
	containing a dream of yours
	—your skull appeared to me
― 18 ―
	And it had an exalted presence;
	it didn't look at me—it looked at you.
	And it drew near my skull, and I looked at you.
	And when you were looking at me, my skull appeared to you;
	it didn't look at you.
	It looked at me.

	In the exalted night,
	someone looked on;
	and I dreamed your dream
	—beneath a soundless rain,
	you hid within your skull,
	and I hid within you.

Here

	In the distance, in the silence, in the kingdoms of childhood,
	someone wept for me.
	Your primordial gaze filled all space, and eternity was reborn, and youth.
	A drop of water, in place of me.

In the Heights

	I looked at you from close up, spring was propitious in the heights.
	The splendor visible in all your organs, the revelation of my desire for you,
― 19 ―
	its source and secret
	—and then night fell.

The Basket of Wool

	Desiring yet unable, I dreamt myself in this room sleeping and I dreamt myself being able,
	making a basket of wool toll like a bell to keep myself sleeping,
	and wanting them to come not come, and to make not make a basket of wool toll like a bell prompting a sadness without desire,
	eliciting a Japanese music that makes me weep remembering but not hearing,
	summoning an unsummonable scene that pure luck renders summonable,
	as when one says:
	now that this lady summons speaking and that gentleman speaks summoning,
	as when one says:
	ℌCome here, little parrot; let's make this basket of wool toll like a bell," leaving everyone happy with this Japanese music that makes me weep, in summoning,
	and which goes on eliciting and tolling and goes on playing through the night.

So I Am Persuaded

for Jaime Taborga V

	Everyone lives in one
	—I, you, they.
	We all live in all, no one lives or dies, and each is on his own
	—but nobody knows what happens.
― 20 ―
	The world is a conjecture, so I am persuaded.
	The form you attribute to yourself, the one I attribute to myself, the world assumes.
	Movement and form are one and the same, and there is no such thing as the roundness of the world,
	but indeed there is a form that ceaselessly transforms itself by virtue of time's movements
	condensing and expanding into spirals already, into essences and lives, or into the kingdoms of chaos,
	to return to the primordial particle, or to trail off into far regions of the decreated and the uncreated,
	where nothing happens no matter what might happen, and where everything happens no matter what may not;
	which is precisely where form's first and final cause must be found,
	so I am persuaded.

The City

for Blanca Wiethüchter and Ramiro Molina

	With the smoke and with the fire, many people muffled and silent
	on a street, on a corner,
	in the high city, pondering the future in search of the past
	—in the subtle entrails, night lightning,
	in the probing eye, thoughts go to agony.

	In another age, hope and happiness were good for something—time's flow invisible,
― 21 ―
	and the darkness, an invisible thing,
	was revealed but to the infinite elders fumbling forward to feel if you might not be among them,
	while fumbling to touch some children they think they feel, even though these little ones feel them and are confused with them, feeling you,
	as in solitude you feel a shawl of darkness woven with unfathomed sadness by some habitant,
	dead and lost in this transparent darkness that is the city I myself inhabit,
	inhabiting a city at the base of my soul which is inhabited but by a single habitant,
	—and like a city filled with sparks, filled with stars, filled with fires on street corners,
	filled with coals and embers in the wind,
	like a city where many beings, alone and distant from me, move and murmur with a destiny heaven no longer knows.
	with eyes, with idols, and with children smashed by that very heaven
	with no more life than this life, with no more time than this time,
	hemmed-in by the great wall of fire and oblivion, rocking in the swing of despair,
	soundlessly weeping with this sinking city.

	And no angel or demon in this well of silence.
	Only fires lining the long streets.
	Only the cold contours of shadows, the indifference of the sun pulling back.
	The breath of a dawn for the last time breaking, the doors creaking in wind,
	the boundaries breaking up and scattering and forms fusing with the flames,
	the signs and the songs,
	with a remote anguish, in soil and beyond soil,
	and the breathing of the dead, the incessant rains,
	resignation with its taste of bread, in a house that stalks me between dreams,
	the patios and the steps, the beings and the stones, and hallways without end,
― 22 ―
	the windows opening to emptiness and shutting to shock,
	the rooms where I lose myself and the corners where I hide
	—the dark walls and the wet moss, the outposts where I look for I don't know what,
	hiding myself from the rising stench of habit.

	No voice, no light, no testimony of my former life.
	Only the fires,
	undying though forever flickering, and only the fires.
	The desolate portent of the ghost once named youth
	—in my city, in my dwelling.

Watching the River Flow

for Leonardo García-Pabón

	When the hour comes I'll speak with you, watching the river flow, at the river's edge.
	With the profile of your face, with the echo of your voice, parceling out my voice into the depths,
	into the great spaces that death's eye has seen, you will know the hidden word.
	Where the wind stills. Where living is finished off and all color is one.
	Where water is not touched and where earth is not touched: inside my invisible presence, where you know yourself to be, in the millenary present
	—of deeds, of smells and of forms; of animals, of minerals, of plants inside time.
	In time, of time. Inside premonition's root. Inside the seed, inside anguish,
	only you will know the hidden word.
― 23 ―
	The aloneness of the world. The aloneness of man. Man's reason for being and the world's
	—the circular solitude of the sphere. Increment and decline;
	the closing of the hermetic thing. The hermetic closing of the thing.
	The immense, the immeasurable—the incommensurate grave, indivisible and blank.

Someone Must Be Called Twilight

for Carlos Ramírez

	Through the years the glow persists.
	The horizon, where my steps echo and go out with the twilight, persists.
	The rains of spring, the waiting that begins when the year closes up, and the ceaselessly appearing vision;
	this sky of spirits, this sky of things and shadows; the fall of evening persists.
	The dead, the stones and songs persist; the clouds and the din and the lives;
	the darkness, the world and the distance.
	Through the tunnel of years, the glow persists.
	Because nothing can swallow itself but real life which lives on the glow that swallows it.

	Many times searching without being able to find you, the twilight would surprise me in the hour of your eyes.
	Many times I forgot you, wanted to forget myself and remember, and remembered I had to forget you,
	thinking of you for the very reason I didn't want to remember you
― 24 ―
	—the twilight would surround me at such times, I remember it perfectly.
	I confused you with the twilight confusing myself with you;
	you confused me with the twilight confusing yourself with me,
	and you and I confused ourselves with the twilight which confused you in me and me in you,
	confusing with you what was confused in me to confuse with me what was confused in you.
	And many times in the same person there was a confusion of twilight, you and me,
	and many more each confused with three other distinct persons,
	adding up to nine altogether, which is to say, zero.

	And there was no such person called twilight,
	or, to tell the truth, no person not called twilight,
	except those called you and I, who nevertheless could not keep from calling each other twilight.

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From The Scalpel (1955)

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Homage to Epilepsy

THESE ARE THE LITTLE EPILEPTIC'S HAIRS

The little epileptic's hairs grow out darkly at the break of night. Their resins flow into undulant ends, and they seem like colossal columns of granite in the glorious and mysterious field of love and death.

Within these hairs, which I respect as beings unto themselves, there are swings of baffling roundness on which I see the black magic and love of space.

These are the hairs of the dead one in the span of a hand that has fingered the mystery.

THE COACH OF THE DEAD

A long time ago, when I was a child, they tried to teach me things aboutcertain things. But I never managed to grasp the norms of discipline.

One day I was walking through the city and I saw a coach. It caused me great distress. I don't know, now, if it was green or blue or red, but over the course of my life I came to believe it was colorless, that it was simply a coach.

On that day when, as a child, I saw the coach, I was infected with who knows what strange force, what strange presentiments.

It was the coach of the dead, according to the revelation of the epileptic child I encountered years later on a sunny afternoon …

This incident, of course, means little at all, given that the child refers to any passing coach as the "coach of the dead."

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ONE OF THE DEAD HAS DIED

The dead, just like the living, can die again.

So the revelation of the epileptic child, on a sunny afternoon.

The dead have the power to die.

The fact of dying deprives no one of the right to die again. Here lies the secret to existence.

This is why the dead have died.

This is also why the dead are, in a sense, precocious.

THE DOOR THAT OPENS TO MYSTERY

It's possible to conjure a door, not a door through which children pass into a timeless room, but an authentic door that opens into mystery.

To conjure a preamble to lunacy, so that all those who fabricate nothing have no idea what to do.

That child, I know, harbors secrets to a door that might lead into mystery while bypassing, let me be clear, the attendant putrefactions.

There is a door. That door is open to you, to me, to everyone. It is open to the rats considering you night after night from the moon.

The child must be allowed to go on with some of his hairs and a piece of the door to mystery before he stops recognizing the streets and rocks.

(This is the secret of the door.)

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A SNUFFED MATCH

A snuffed match is simply a snuffed match. The transcendence of a snuffed match lies in its being snuffed and in the fact that although it no longer exists, it is still called a match.

But that match there, on a sheet of paper, is dead. That is what matters. What really matters is that it be dead.

It is being, itself, and being there, it must be acknowledged to be as large as the universe. Like something that folds itself into the intervals of nothingness.

SHROUD THAT SHIELDS SILHOUETTE PAPERS

It's a shroud. I'm sure everyone has seen a shroud in childhood, if only in stories. Everyone in childhood has seen shrouds and shrouds. Nevertheless, I have begun to put the shrouds of the whole world into a deep freeze.

Suddenly I am back in my room. I see a freshly washed shroud, but it's only a joke.

I sleep in worn, moonspotted sheets and dream of shrouds.

They cover me, they soundlessly fasten me to my coming putrefaction, the torches grind themselves out over my glorious body in the middle of the night.

Later, inside magic, they come to life, wrapping me up with the creatures of fate.

They are papers cut out by the moon. It's necessary to let them lie there, where the hapless tables are sleeping, all of them, all of them, the hapless spiders, it's necessary to let them lie just as they are, in the music of their child-shrouds.

The silhouette papers blow across the world carrying the melancholy stigmata of good-byes.

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THE FATHOMLESS HOWL

It's merely a fathomless howl. It comes from far off. It has nothing to do with the womb, with the lungs, or the liver. It is, simply, a howl after which you want to leave serenely for the moon, taking along a few hairs from a certain gifted child. "A fathomless howl," I have been told, "is the howl of all humankind, always."

IMAGE OF THE CHILD

So sweet is his image. No one can see it, save the snail rooted to seashore.

No one can see it, except the spiders that live where you live, where the haunting organic gears of eternity live.

Nothing can hold back his childhood-desire.

This is how his image is. The life of the illusory images of death and life.

He has a design.

The design is an outline of love and death's secret, though the child is blind to love and death, though with his homage to epilepsy, it swells into a vague omnipotence.

(Pure and lifeless object for harvesting loneliness.)

the catastrophe and the phases of the eye with death

Everything ends now. Sublime catastrophe.

Here in the night's heart, I have paid homage to the mysterious epileptic, just so, and with the meekness of a lake.

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I offer my homage. Soundlessly, catastrophe comes. The needles point to the sky. It will always be this way.

The eyes turn yellow and make a lattice over the other things that are not. The life that is real is about to arrive.

Paraphrase of "So Have You Told Him or Notó"

The paraphrase of what she had said is a reflection of Wiesbaden. Rainy and fleeting as she is, luminous as she is, and with that quick gift she has for disappearing into the throng, having passed within five centimeters of me, without even knowing me, or as if we had met on the shore of some immense ocean with wooly floor, with fish blazing across its surface, their backs puffed out, their spines rigid and splayed. Fish with a marvelous gift for the particular. They call you by name, though you scarcely believe it. Unlike other genera of fish, these are able to roll their eyes to follow your movements, and they are able (this is a remarkable case of devotion) to abandon the sea and drag themselves over sand until they expire, and for no other reason than to discharge their one duty, which is tofollow you through the rabid and aimless multitude.

But, needless to say, you are not the multitude. Rather, you are its essence, the very being of multitude. It is understood, the multitude radiates outward from you, and it is understood down to the bones of grief that there would be no multitude were it not of your making. This is why I love not only the multitude, but multitudes. I love it and I love them because I have a concept of you that is big with eternity, and because the primordial weather for learning some slender stretch of anguish consists of the multitude and the multitudes, into which, into it and into them, you have breathed life by that miraculous enigma of the word spoken and heard across a few centimeters: "So have you told him or not?"

What it is I am making, and what I call "Paraphrase of ‘So have you told him, or not?’" is nothing more than an incidence of distant, vague conjectures, of

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black, fierce, and lucid imaginings about you, when once I (I, I myself) had my arms outstretched to the wind, the scent, let's say, of Wiesbaden—like this evening—and a translucent skull.

The Candle and the Breeze (Excerpt)

One man is thrust into fire, while another notes his misfortune from the water's edge without taking into account the idea of the flame with which the candle struggles, flickering and far from those realities in which the world is transfigured into platter or kidney, or in which a tomato might exude the feeling of a fine, rose hue in equipoise to the burning throats of children, be they beautiful or pox ridden or tightrope walkers.

By chance, have you ever seen the nucleus of the flame, and have you not been startled by the marvel of it? Have you ever thought about the fires of the hands, the fires of the neck, the fires of the convent at dawn while you search for something like a holy stone to swallow; have you ever thought of the child's scarlet fever, thought of him clotted with forests, immersed in melancholy, allegoric and brittle, wracked by the wild storm, slick from soap, intrinsically doughy, with his elongated neck and his monstrous lips, his shirt in tatters, with the aroma of flowers around his shoulders and knees?

There is, in his demeanor, a preternatural candle that measures out destiny. There is, above all, in his clothes, a tiny gauge by which the fire and breeze are metered.

If you see something blazing, you regmember the flame. If you see the sea, you remember it; and if you see clods of dirt on the wide and dry roads, you remember it.

There is an interval of pebbles and party-noise when you light a candle to bestow a certain allegory upon his death, so tiny, so sad, rainy and circled by fire.

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E.

"E"; you know what "E" means.

"E" means the first death, the root one, one's own death, which leaves the others waiting horribly alone and smug to be alive, scrubbed with the best soaps.

That's what "E" means. "E," so dead and quiet and architectonic as you, experimenting with whether or not to use it, saying "I'm here," "one," "were," "fear," "hope," "petticoat," "Caquiaviri," "then," "Erasmus"; or better, "student," "we're on our way to my father's house," "I am here to invite you all to crumpets," "illusion," "don't tickle gentlemen on the bus," "it seems like they insist on not putting the leashes where they belong," "grooves," "the faggots have not yet been taken from the oven," "a couple brothers want to sell their coffee shop, but for cash," "the clothes are wet," "you always want to have it your way," "sewer drain."

That's how "E" is.

Deafening and curious, like rain; you can't suit "E" or "T" to any other letter of the alphabetum, to the candle or the breeze.

The candle and the breeze are beings apart. Each unknowing the other. Your sadness spokes outward from this unknowing. It is the interregnum between your soul and the candle and the breeze.

Now go and sleep with the dark things you are always seeking and never finding.

---

The Voyage of the Lindens and the Madrepores while
Rocking in the Weariness of the Age-Old Cradles (Excerpt)

They walk in the echo. They walk darkly, as trances walk. They walk disrupting the rhythms, they walk with that anguished night-whistling, lugging their howling, sublime emissaries. They walk on their buttocks, the pubis forgotten. But more than anything, they walk so assertively it is frightening.

You are not to forget it. They walk straining their being, they walk as if another walked in them, they walk on, terrifying, full of themselves, puffed up, fervent.

They walk like no one walks. They keep walking, even lying down at someone's side. They walk awake and asleep, they walk backward, they walk out of step, visited by rare dispensations.

They walk as if someone had commanded: "Don't walk."

(With the magnet on their backs, they know and don't know where they walk. But they are led to the vexed, formidable core of smiles forgotten in the coursing river, in the echo rising—I don't know how—from the piano and the cello, in the zenith of a cold and bewildering evening. Night, inescapably, had to fall.)

They are the inventors of noise, you know this. They bid farewell with a noise, with a cunning, bitter noise.

They take their crumbs noisily to the sea, and they get up, they lie down, and they materialize noisily, with the ironic, pleasing, prophetic noise of good-byes. They are formidable.

They are the enigmatic form of weeping. Without knowing it, they have plotted out the clever schemes, the oblique, universal, eternal schemes.

The intuited manners of felt rhythm, of the tender ruckus to which one wakes. The intuited magical manners of premonition, the exalted manners of the square

---

and the circle; the odd, invisible manners, those with double gestures, those of spent ecstasy, of spent woe, of inmost supplication, those of the astonishing griefcrossing.

They are the first finders of melancholy. They are, in their hushed terror, precursors to the voyage's figure. The voyage's mode of displacing no one, not even the travelers.

They are figures both vague and precise, bestial angels, supreme, assumed, real, catastrophic, ideal symbols. They are decent and full of quiet, and they are, on this night, fantastic universes, huge beckonings of nothingness, cries spurted from bone, memorial instigators of your smile.

---

To Cross This Distance (1973)

To the image of Puraduralubia

---

---

I

	I am divided from myself by the distance I find myself in,
	the one who is dead is divided from death by a great distance.
	I plan to cross this distance, resting along the way.
	Face up, in the dwelling of desire,
	stock still, in my place—opposite the locked door,
	with a winter's light at my side.

	In the corners of my room, in the chair's arena.
	With wavering memory splitting off from the void
	—on the ceiling of the vault,
	the one who is dead must communicate with death.

	Contemplating the bones on the plank, numbering the darknesses with my fingers starting from you.
	Seeing that things are, I fill with desire.
	And I find myself crossing a great distance.

II

	Like nocturnal air, the Festival of the Spirit is a finished thing,
	like the ladder—leaning against a wall to hear the word—is a finished thing,
	like the line I once traced, the line your shadow fled, is a finished thing.
― 40 ―
	Like the smoke in the braziers with the incense and the vapors spreading,
	longing for voices,
	like the lights and the mirrors rising toward the winter skies,

	with the vanished memory of the customs and of those who are definitively distant in the distance,
	thus it is that the implements and the skulls are no longer implements nor skulls,
	in the ceremonies of winter, they are no longer used.

III

	At the touch of the fleeting secret, of stopped time, of self-consuming fire, and of ice, present and eternal,
	every eye, every image, will blaze up and burn.
	Every hollow within the earth, every darkness that falls, will forever remain.
	(If you're a sorcerer, laugh. But if not, hearing that the devil is on your tail, don't laugh.)
	With the passing of the years and the turning of these worlds and the lights I've gathered from contemplating the stars, I've become aware.
	In the torrential waters every soul dissolves into universal soul.

IV

	The immense malaise cast by shadows, the melancholic visions surging from the night,
― 41 ―
	everything terrifying, everything cruel, that without reason, that without name,
	one has to take it, who knows why.

	If you have nothing to eat but garbage, don't say a word.
	If the garbage makes you sick, don't say a word.
	If they cut off your feet, if they boil your hands, if your tongue rots, if your spine splits in two, if your soul fines down to nothing, don't say a word.
	If they poison you, don't say a word, even if your bowels slide from your mouth and your hair stands straight up; even if your eyes well with blood, don't say a word.
	If you feel good, don't feel good. If you fall behind, don't fall behind. If you die,
	don't die. If you're sad, don't be sad. Don't say a word.
	Living is hard; it's hard work not to say a word.
	Putting up with people without saying a word is tough.
	It's very hard—inasmuch as they expect to be understood without saying a word—
	to understand people without saying a word.
	It's terribly difficult yet very easy to be a decent person;
	the truly difficult thing is not to say a word.

V

	The hatred which the father who is son professes to the son who is father is father of the hatred which the son who is father professes to the father who is son.
	Everyone conspires against everyone and each bites and tears apart the other; they never starve and they eat shit, whether they actually eat shit or don't eat it, traffic or don't traffic in silks and liquors and all kinds of commodities,
― 42 ―
	they laugh at humankind and cut diamonds, they stop and take up dominoes, now racing, now betting on everything,
	they go to the country and sail at their leisure, they travel by train, they fly by plane, they eat cookies and pass out kisses and greetings,
	well-pleased with their spit-shined shoes, with their slick, styled hair, with their bronzed complexions, and their crocodile-skin wallets.
	They grow thoughtful reading the papers, they sigh with calculated restraint, they cough with self-satisfaction and fall ill every now and then, as prescribed by rituals of decorum,
	and you just have to see the look they get as they climb into the jet.
	The majestic air they adopt when they're talking shop, their severity when they mention ethics,
	the casual grace with which their noses are blown, that slight tilt of the head, that pleasantness, that I don't know what with which they grin,
	you just have to see that rare people-person way, the zeal, the assertiveness, the knack, the secret charm they exude in all their exploits,
	and the animus in the gesture; that disconcerting subtlety with which they hold forth on art and psychology,
	the wise judgment and authority on human pain, and with what anguish they offer their opinion;
	you just have to see the enormous nobility of the look with which they forgive the failings of mere mortals;
	the consummate technique with which they chew and swallow a thousand pills to keep themselves plump and rosy;
	the stylishness with which they arrive to consult the shrink, just in time to check their watch and get nervous—
	a little nervous, not too much, with aristocratic smirk and nobleness of visage;
	you just have to see the stunning grace with which they move in the world and the importance they concede to their lives;
― 43 ―
	the transcendent meaning in every motion and, even more, in each of their nervous tics, even when they have none;
	you just have to see the heroic poses, the facility with which they assume a fierce tone of voice,
	the tremendous audacity of resolve as they die of fright, the shudder in the asshole when they freeze with fear,
	and the ayees and the yikes, the owies and the yowies, when they cry for help the moment they sense their precious lives besieged by some ghost,
	and the cock-strut they do to hide the terror that consumes them;
	you just have to see what awaits them, a demon coiling inside,
	which will rend them apart without pause or pity, thanks to your silence and by deed of your silence.

VI

	I feel the coming of a dark day, a closed space, an incomprehensible event, a night endless as immortality.
	What I feel has nothing to do with me, nor with you; it's nothing personal, nothing particular, this thing I feel;
	but it has to do with I don't know what
	—perhaps the world, or kingdoms of the world, or the mysterious enchantments of the world;
	one looks and sees, across the waters, a profound fissure.
	One can perceive, through the odor of things and through the forms they assume, the exhaustion of things.
	In what grows, in what has ceased to grow, in what echoes, in what stays, in what doesn't stay, in the soundless air, in the metamorphosis of the insect, in the murmuring of trees,
― 44 ―
	one can sense the joy of a coming end.
	The devouring darknesses, dying to devour—the finale finished. Nothing more to be.
	Save perhaps a mist, high above some place, maybe deep inside some place,
	wafting across the farthest waters.
	The gasping without end or beginning, a shroud for stillness,
	enshrouding the circular motions of the eternal return
	—I don't know how to explain, I don't know how to name this feeling I feel.

VII

	At the inexplicable site, exactly where ruin and reunion have taken place,
	the loveliness of life is a truth that one neither can nor should deny.
	The beauty of life,
	through the miracle of living.
	The loveliness of life,
	which remains,
	through the miracle of dying.

	Life flows, passes and soars, coils into an unreachable innerness.
	In the aura of the passersby, at the very quick,
	in the wind, quavering with the leaving and coming of the passersby,
	in the sayings, in the pleadings, in the shouts, in the smoke
	—in the streets, with a light sometimes on the walls, and other times with a darkness.
	In that gazing upon things with which animals tend to gaze;
― 45 ―
	in that gazing of the human, with which the human tends to gaze at the gaze of the animal gazing upon things.
	In the weave of cloth,
	in iron where iron is iron.
	In the table,
	in the house.
	In the river's edge.
	In the moisture of the air.
	In the heat of summer, in the cold of winter, in the light of spring
	—in an opening and closing of eyes.
	Tearing open the horizon or entombing itself in the abyss,
	real life rears its head and goes under.

VIII

	In a burning and pulsing force I long for enchantment.
	In the ancient silence of a wind I long for enchantment.
	In the isolate world from which nothing flows, save only lost enchantment, which returns me to you,
	I long for the gallows where once I saw myself hanging to gaze fully at you,
	in all your movements, your ways
	—I long for the years, the dates, the exact days that are called today,
	the exact instants that are called now—the tomorrow that has been, the yesterday that is to be,
	I long for a certain wound that was yours, that gathered into a certain wound that was mine,
	which tunneled into the abyss of your eyes
	—into the abyss of your eyes, in which I long for the abyss of your eyes.

---

IX

	With shadows and prodigious pirouettes the jugglers emerge from the night.
	With elbows and kicks they force their way through the crowd of stunned celebrities who stare dazzled.
	Suddenly, they roll out to the center of the ring, doing stunts.
	They cinch their belts and tumble into the jumble of dwarf ponies who just now appear; they wink their eyes and keep tumbling,
	and they sip coffee and eat apples, they do this, do the other thing, and do something else altogether,
	and this is what they do, and the other thing, and something else altogether, and not something else, until the stage resounds as someone comes on,
	and eating garlic the whistle-blower makes the rafters resound
	and everyone cowers and hunches over, and withdraws inward, and is absorbed in thought,
	in the midst of a deep silence that reigns the lights go up, the lights don't go up, the lights go off,
	to the spell of bewitched dogs bursting into the ring doing spectacular flips,
	uncertainty descends and then doesn't descend with the bewitched dogs
	who begin to trot all around the roundness of the circle in finest style, surmounting obstacles that are inherently insurmountable,
	with graceful contortions and with suitable and regal step,
	very conscious of the admiring admiration with which the admired admirers admire them,
	with thousands and thousands of eyes that anxiously turn and roll with the spins and spinnings of an apparatus that is truly ostentatious,
	of perilous trajectories, truly intricate, but not nonsensical.
	And with the dust they kick up, and with the sawdust they kick up, and with the ponies they kick up, and with the jugglers they kick up, and with the garbage they kick up, and with the midgets these bewitched dogs kick up,
― 47 ―
	a lady of a beauty never seen rises up, and, after removing her eyeballs and wiping her spectacles, after letting rip a scream, she passes out,
	and gibberish abounds, exaltation abounds, chocolate and joy, in joyous hearts, to the rhythm of the general delight,
	to the rhyme with which these bewitched dogs rise up, for the reason of removing one's eyes, in the rhyme of wiping one's spectacles, for the reason of letting rip a scream and passing out, without rhyme or reason, to the rhythm of universal consternation,
	to the rhyme of a hound blown all out of proportion, for the reason of throwing itself into barking, in the rhyme of leaping, for the reason of wetting the wall, in the rhyme of clawing up the post that supports the hounds, for the reason of going off with them,
	to the rhyme of interring themselves in an indeterminate and unknown world, hostile, thick with burrs and devoid of daisies,
	to the rhythm of an earthly man washing his hands, so generous, so giving, so kind,
	who looks at them with impotent rage and snorts like a bellows,
	with pathetic gestures of astonishment, with powerful magnetic stares,
	with the neck of a bull and a devil's horns, with the head of a plover and the back of an ursus, with a blowfly buzzing in the skull,
	with powdered cheeks and gloved hands, advancing with hasty and desperate step,
	who enters and sits center ring, making sorrowful signs and then starts to weep,
	provoking a circular movement at the expense of the crowd which, in effect, spills forth in a scramble to surround the stricken one,
	engendering a ring with a hundred little ringlets thanks to many other people who have emerged from nothing less than nothingness,
	thanks to the sorrowful signs made by the stricken one hoping to avoid just that,
	except that all the disguises and masks and foremen, the incompetent and the competent surround him, all the motley and makeup and the characters, with the tributes and rituals of flatter,
― 48 ―
	the mortals and immortals, large and small, white and black, women and not-women, men and not-men surround him,
	implicated and not implicated in the signs he makes, while he makes those he doesn't make but doesn't make them, which he doesn't unmake but makes, except what he makes; and this is what he makes.

X

	In the world's deep realms are great spaces
	—a nothingness ruled over by nothingness itself,
	which is cause and origin of the first terror, of thought and echo.
	Inconceivable depths exist, hollows before whose allure, before whose haunting spell,
	one would surely and simply die.
	Sounds one would surely yearn to hear, forms and visions one would surely yearn to see,
	things one would surely yearn to touch, revelations one would surely yearn to know,
	who knows with what secret yearning and coming to know who knows what.

	In the essential soul of the world's synchrony and duration,
	buried in the abyss from which the world arose, and embedded in the marrow of the world,
	an odor can be sensed, which you will recognize at once, for you have never known another like it;
― 49 ―
	the odor of truth, the only one, the odor of the abyss—and you will have to know it.
	Because only when you come to know it will you understand how it's always been true that wisdom coheres in the absence of air.

	In the deepest darkness of the world, wisdom will offer itself, in the hermetic kingdoms of the soul;
	in the vicinities of fire and in fire itself, in which the selfsame fire together with air is devoured by the darkness.
	And it is because no one has any idea of the abyss, and because no one has known the abyss, nor has sensed the odor of the abyss,
	that wisdom cannot be spoken of among men, among the living.
	While alive, man will not be able to understand the world; man ignores the fact that as long as he doesn't leave off living, he will not be wise.
	He fears everything that borders on wisdom; as soon as he can't understand, he distrusts
	—he understands nothing outside the living.

	And I say that one should strive to be dead.
	To do so at all costs, before dying. One would need to do everything possible to be dead.
	The waters tell you of it—fire, air, and the light, in clearest speech.
	To be dead.
	Love tells you of it, the world and all manner of things, to be dead.
	Darkness tells nothing. It is pure silence.
― 50 ―
	One has to think of the sealed spaces. Of the vaults opening beneath the oceans.
	Of the caverns and the grottoes—one has to think of the fissures, of the infinite tunnels in the umbrae.
	If you think of yourself, all your soul and body, you will be the world—in its innerness and in its visible forms.
	Become accustomed to thinking intently of one thing; everything is dark.
	What is true, what is real, what exists; being and essence, it is one and dark.
	Thus, darkness is the world's law; fire fans the darkness and goes out—it is devoured by darkness.
	I say this: it is necessary to think of the world—what is inside the world gives me much to think about. I am dark.
	I'm not interested in thinking of the world beyond the world; light is interrupting, as is living—which is transitory.

	What could living ever have to do with life; living is one thing, life is another.
	Life and death are one.

XI

	A distance crossed, an uninhabited city. In a lost city,
	an inhabited city—time never was.
	The rain's reflection, another rain.
	A greeting, a sign—they greet you and they go.
	A melody heard, a forgetting—a forgetting and who knows what,
	a spell of emptiness,
	a scent,
	a glance
― 51 ―
	—which memory does not drain off, which memory does not wash back.
	And that is all.
	Nothing and no one remains; it is one.
	It all remains with one, and nothing remains
	—matter, the earth. What is not touched, what is touched,
	what is not,
	everything is and remains.
	What has been, what is, what is to be, there is no time
	—there is nothing—everything is.

	Don't feel hurt
	—don't hurt one bit.
	Time never was; nothing has ever been; the human has everything
	—hope is a grave thing.
	To say farewell and become the farewell,
	that is fitting.

XII

	What hand will have been touched by this hand.
	What mouth will have been kissed by this mouth.
	What eyes will have been seen by these eyes.
	Amid what paths, amid what darknesses, will these eyes have gazed at me.
	Where will this hand have been found by my hand; when will this hand have been revealed by my hand.
	On what day, what hour, in what place, will I have found this body and this soul I love.
― 52 ―
	In what mysterious moment will I have found my soul and my body to love as I do this soul and this body that I love.

	This body, this soul, are here.
	I am and here am I in this soul, in this body, in this soul that I love and this body that I love.
	By way of its breath, in the invisible and the concealed, I found this soul.
	In the way of gazing out and being of this body—in the way of being of its vestment,
	in the vestment's dark and subtle way of being present and not present, I found the secret,
	I found presence.

	With a sound echoing here, with a remote antiquity,
	in this distance
	rain is falling;
	with a gentle breeze of shadows and lights, in which this phantasmal country vanishes bit by bit
	—with a throbbing and with a song,
	with a dream that is far down, this being sleeps in the splendors of a limbo,
	in the flickering splendors of a limbo.

	From very distant places, from very deep spaces,
	with the breath of joy in which the earth is swaying,
	an air arrives
	—the air that arrives at the latest hour, charged with premonition.
― 53 ―
	At enchantment's final hour, in which the earth sinks away somewhere,
	beyond the wall,
	where this body that I love is lying,
	where this soul that I love is lying.

	Beyond the beyond of all the paths,
	in the transcendence of the scent of this body that I love,
	in the transcendence of the scent of this soul that I love.

---

From Immanent Visitor (1964)

Your serious happiness flows out behind you in an ecstasy of ancient voyage.

For my mother and my Aunt Esther; and for my dead friends.

---

---

I

	This immanent visitor haunts lilies and the body's delicate down, he adorns a penumbra.
	He roams the chords and the manifold contours, and here, in the window and there, in the magnificent forest,
	this wayfarer gazes at me, unreadable,
	veils himself in the dense and pungent smell of lamps
	and in those intricate weavings oblivion loomed
	—the felicitous slips into the periphery
	of his marble stare, washed and smooth,
	his gaze and grace and flourished baton orchestrate a song for the fossiled stars
	and from below and above undulate the flux and curve of an undergrowth of dreams
	which our steps flatten without pity to the ground.
	A flame hovers over the prattle, ensombers the wine's sediment,
	and proclaims the arrival of a corpse to the rituals of morning
	—light-fearing, the dead one, with ears of gold and cacao,
	a torso engraved in his memory,
	tears lovely as spiders
	and hands alert in their place,
	amid the stillness of the psalms.

III

	From the blue way you envelop the world,
	the blue way you adore it.
	I'm saddened and in love with your blue way—with the blue way of presence in which you attend my readiness to live and die in this world.
― 58 ―
	With the blue way in which the idea conducts you to gesture's inception—you sense the great roaring you live, and you interpret and explain it for your kind and for us
	at the water's edge, the ear tuned to the revelations of a lily transmuting light's desire on a plain of shifting sands, and the measured turns of the wheel foretelling the idea-child and the event's first and final virtue.
	With the blue way in which you gather your thought
	—the blue way you cast on that lunar trace, when man surrendered his smile to the stars.

	From the time before my beginning, I only keep from you the terror of being born and of giving birth, and the terror of being dead, that others die or are dead,
	because—odd case of forgetfulness—I no longer know your remote teaching.
	I no longer know what you instilled in me, nor will I know it, even dead;
	it's an odd case of forgetfulness, blue way,
	and we'll shake and wobble until your kind and us and our kind and you pass into thou
	the one likeness there, waiting to uncode your living and dying.

	When you allow us and this beautiful world to wound you,
	and you pretend to stumble, or sleep, and feign to have been seen or hint that someone has spied a trace of you,
	and with a bolt of light you radiate fear and surprise into our world,
	we will come round to gaze out from the animal, from the dead and from the living and from the guts of our world,
	and we'll never again forget. It will be redemption, blue way.
― 59 ―
	The musician and the rifles, lightness, heaviness and the shade, the nicknames, the cotton and the cramp, hatred, the swindlers, the magpie, age and the padlocks, spelling and the café and the liars, the flea and ivory, the number, the bees, the vision and me, the tail, the gold and the shelves and the frail,
	we await the sign, eager to fuse into each other and continue the dialogue with you, blue way.

	May the days stretch on and the nights be hazy and the blowflies blessed with bearable life.
	May this be so and so much more
	—may man cease to follow the animals and arrive at the human, the sublime, and the true
	—may wool not be stolen from the animal and each and every being be left in peace.

	Now a scream is heard, screamed who knows why.
	It's not a human scream nor an animal's, but the scream of a thing
	—its origin is here, and it seems unthinkable
	—blue way, I am saddened and bewildered forever.
	It is my intention to cease to see myself and to leave off knowing myself, and I will eat myself, should you not be able to make yourself seen.

V

	Because the day nourishes dry dreams and wounds your angelical being,
	you will set off in search of night
― 60 ―
	—and I'll tell you that she likes to ask, like a mendicant, for the whole of life: she hardly ever takes pity.
	But you, with your incredibly tender way,
	are communicative, and you will move her in that vaulted light if you say:
	"I want death but not the dying"
	—and those at rest beyond the fire will hear the startled word of your flight and seeing how they would have adored you, they won't want to know they are dead.
	And in this way you'll know the chimeras of the night
	and what is unspeakable of death in your shape,
	my joy: I am standing and with a fire in my hands.

(At night, your white-fringed clothes reflect a music of cities and suns and allow another, denser vestment to be seen, which makes the bridges quiver and the voyages embark, and seats the night in your eyes.)

VI

	Under darkness, pain drives the ancient force with which you arouse the verdure's fragrance
	—in the splendors the heart will lift from mountains, in the forgetfulness of great bells,
	in the dilated and hardened poles of the hymns is the pivotal chord that shocks you into seeing:
	one pole of the magnet goes blank, and you adjust the cadence of your fingers to the smoke's leisurely climb.
― 61 ―
	Under aloneness, at the hour of bewilderment and amazement, evening falls;
	toward great depths and displacements, the horizon bears your weight,
	and the dead one is ardent, worldly in the sea froth, in murmurings and in light
	—and the water begins to boil, prophecy makes the rounds.

	It shines in grottoes and on your lips, and the current in your dreams won't slacken,
	a bell's clapper separates you from night's camisole;
	I won't perish until you lay an egg in everlasting testimony to that current.

VII

	Alive at the edge of language, the head floating in a body not there
	a finger in the fog
	the running water in the world of those who embroider their presence with a border of flax
	and another finger in wind that swings the suns of a miracle named by summer and rain
	and the ancientness of light still unrobed, unseen
	then one night another finger twitching to a vague melody on the bridge
	and the heaviness of sobbing in the bouquet, bequeathed from offspring to offspring
	when the swollen fury of the gleaming torrent roars past
	but the bond calls you and calls you and another finger, sheathed in flame, prods and prods your heart
	—you bat your eyes at the magical sign that orbits your body and licks at stubborn life
― 62 ―
	—you're on the way to a city, and someone straining and straining to be born snaps the lighter off
	and you eat his desire and the cauldron of a drum disenchants itself before your eyes.
	Fibers and sounds, scattered on the ground, find something of their first secret in you
	and the measured throb of nocturnal murmurs arrives triumphant
	one could say that the mill swelled and the lives were resurrected before the clouds,
	shed your husk, admit the genuine, and you will fly over the watery deep
	—each May, each instant, and each year it is possible to say whether the true water is occluded,
	whether the fire is hidden and burns you
	—and so
	shed your husk quickly, because everything is shedding itself.

	There are hidden cities hiding cities in their hearts, and the first day their brilliance reigns, and the last day is a lost memory shining in man's eye
	—their streets make explicit the world and suggest its summit, and the spiral is fragrant with hair and skulls
	—from you to me, from them to them, from all to all, the spiral comes and goes, and in the city it dehisces;
	a concise rain washes your brow as you sigh, and the pendulum's arc and the moist fountains return the scent to you, the smooth sea-code of dreams.

	The edifice of the echo liberates you from all sense;
	your serious happiness flows out behind you in an ecstasy of ancient voyage.
	A petrifying hand on your cheek, and anxiety, and the epistle and the minerals
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	make music for the adoring animals who, to the cadence of your laughter and
	weeping, name your attire
	—and your hair leads you toward absence.

	And in those cities—o habitant!—death is strong and manifold, and agony
	powerful; dreams surge from your blood
	—they reveal the heavenly body of the forgotten letter—the letter missing from
	the missing word
	—and the luxury of blood spills over into cities where it is not possible to die.

VIII

	The water decants a hymn to freeze breath and shadow.
	Let your washed head stretch proportion this far, and I'll comb the sides of the sea
	and the lost fire glittering in the proud, the dead dampness.

	(In the distance of the abyss, abruptly, the night moth turned reflective, invisible, and patient as the devotion and suppleness radiating from its legs.)
	One arrives, hides in not knowing he has arrived, and finds a roaring:
	it would seem to be your voice,
	but the suddenness of light and the smell of antiquity
	conceal the smile of its nascent ecstasy.

---

X

	I glimpse you
	—if the beginnings of night have spilled, a glimmering welcomes me.
	The moment you cross the blackness, a trumpet blast cancels you;
	you are the irremediable sign of the cities and the brilliances.

	You are on both shores, in me; in the far weaving you inhabit smoke and hill
	and the woven rain resembles what you've abandoned and what I will never inhabit.
	As soon as sorrow comes, I search for you in my sorrow
	—when I was a breath and an arena,
	where, what were you doing,
	you are inside yourself but in reality you would not be.

	You beg me, melancholically, to reshape you as a fountain, black-stockinged sorceress, lover, sometimes, of oblivion
	—habitant who knows she doesn't exist, who doesn't elude seeingness and feelingness:
	it's hilarious, that I am and you are not.
	Your life without me, it's impossible to consider.

	May your voice be present, be forever here,
	whether I hear it or not.
	Be present, always be.

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XI

	From the dead one, gazing from sublime heights at the twilight's last shudder,
	a faint heat has been left in you,
	—the blue form's trace in the firm chord that rocks the wind with faint heat,
	it is in you.

	May the silence offer a bit of sweetness, break off from forgetfulness
	so it might die in a forgetfulness
	and dilute itself in you and pass away in the pour of rain;
	and may all things be language unfolding at the sign of a sigh.
	And may a ship from the skies reveal our flesh and our hurt.

XVI

	Don't play that music
	—when it gets cold, the forms crave a breath of your grace, a sibilance, a
	descending dew.

	The chasm of your weight is moist, and the sphinxes avert their eyes from you;
	if what surrounds you is yours and scrubs you clean, you watch, being sphinx
	—the surrounding watchfulness radiates from you in the alpha and omega of
	your symphonic life.

	I want to discover what wind carries you and what rain, and your vision's essence in the country of first causes
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	—I urge you to come and wake me, astound me.
	The night's transience compels and undoes me;
	my body is parceled out, and no one is able to see it or to see me.
	I lie down—if I sigh, or touch, or look at myself, it all would end: transparency's hope,
	life itself; the promise of tresses and lights in your apparition
	and the welcome of the temples and the greeting of the songs.

	My voice acclaims a feat; the furious motion of the black hand writes that your avowal is fruitless.
	If you don't plan to sleep with the fishes, if you don't utterly change,
	the extravagant black music will plunge into water, and the city will flow away in a sibilation.

XVII

	Sink your lips into shared death, sheltered by the fingers above and below it,
	bury yourself in the unargued and unstated, in the half-light of those who die in vacillation
	—for death comes not just from life, but also through vacillating.
	(Death, full and harmonic, has nothing to do with death by vacillation,
	and I don't mean that those who don't vacillate might be immortal.)

	If you don't pick up a spider's scent and can't read the stillness, you die;
	but never if your brow were bitten, only so long as you didn't dream it was your own brow biting you.
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	When you haven't vacillated, death waits for the bite of your brow in order to receive you.

	Still, love leads me to clamor for your safekeeping in luminous echoes and universal tasks,
	in active and motionless masses that freeze and proffer joy.
	A wild clamor sustains your preservation, your particular time beyond temperature's sign.

May my wish be engraved in solemnity, in warmth and in wombness.

Like a Light

	In the hour of the star's dying,
	my eyes will lock on the firmament that shimmered with you.
	Soundlessly and like a light,
	lay the transparency of forgetfulness
	on my path.

	Your breath returns me to the patience and sadness of the earth,
	don't divide yourself from evening's fall
	—let me see, on the other side of you,
	what remains for me to die.

You Are Visible

	You stay and stay in the fragrance of the mountains
	when the sun goes down,
	and it seems to me I can hear your breathing in the freshness of the shade
	like a pensive good-bye.

	At the threshold of your leaving, firelike, these clear images will yearn for you.
	They are rocked here and distantly by the evening's wind;
	I accompany you with the rustling of leaves; I watch for you the things you loved
	—dawn will not efface your passing; you are visible.

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For You

	In the furnace of your form my blood flows, in the air of dreaming
	you are the weather for aloneness
	—a shadow sings in the water's depths for you, to the rhythm of my heart
	and in your gaze my eyes are quiet from the music
	borne by light's breath
	in the sky and in the darkness.

	Tonight I gather your form,
	the echo of your mouth at the core of a forgotten song
	—and I embrace you.

Come

	Come; I am nourished by your depiction
	and by your redolent melody,
	I dreamed of the star that could be reached with a song
	—I saw you appear and couldn't grasp you; the song carried you an unsettling distance,
	and the remoteness was too great and your breath too faint to reach the
	light-burst of my heart in time
	—my heart, drowned in a compassionate rain, fiercely efflorescing.

	Come, nevertheless; let my hand impress on your forgetting an unforgettable force,
	draw near to witness my shadow on the wall,
	come once; I want to fulfill my passion for good-bye.

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