reading

RIMBAUD’S EYES

Blue, barbaric. Today soft trills

sing for you and in the literary workshop

the voice of the parrot gets thinner: moved

it sweetens the Great Glances, his confectioner’s lesson.

On this side we pray for you kneeling before a wolf:

for the fair science is a room looking onto darkness

and man, that successful inconstant,

is but a few steps that come in there and go.

Today when teachers of letters have forgotten everything

the convicts know about you

and the tramp who, at the risk of being smashed by cars,

halts the metaphor of this tread to pick up the miracle

of a leaf, far from any understanding,

today when the lift-men scarcely

rise above the others,

today when this mad substance appears smothered and defeated,

as it always was, as it always will be,

floating on the waters of numbers;

today when casinos have taken root in your virgin forests

and disco music sounds in all thundering Africas,

today when on 88th street and Broadway a horrid so-and-so walks you

printed on her T-shirt, smiling at all the American Glory,

today when you, hard bound in leather and with golden letters,

are exhibited by dentists in their hollow libraries

and the swift drug-dealers honour you in their way, distributing poison

along the streets of the world,

today when walls fall and all posterities collapse,

today when History that old foe,

laughs at us it doesn’t exist,

as in your time the Devil repeated;

today when the soft muscles of the congressmen

can throw in the sea thousands of sturdy foreigners if they want,

today when shy democracy has proven more effective

than kings,

today when finally we all at last good

and the pink, black, yellow and copper coloured

banquet of life raises its radiant cup, beyond

the charitable groups attempting the sonnet,

through the bookshelves swept by dust and secretaries,

without typing or voice or hope or reason,

geographies go across two thick powerful lights

circling the Earth. Not for symbol but for glance

you are like the plastic god which the scared one hangs from the wall

so that those Eyes follow him around the house. For us

the minimal ones, for us the few, for us the weak,

who only want to stand idle, your eyelids are

always open, disdainful brother,

Jesus Christ the Terrible,

today when it’s shameful to be hungry

your wild lanterns keep on looking at the same thing.

MINIM FOR THE DEATH OF A LITTLE BLACK BEETLE

Also the cat heard that minute agony

exasperating amidst plants: a light incident

made ever thinner till the sound of naught,

the note of nothingness again drawn

by a musical god on his great score.

Can I also, my friends,

be the last country poet,

even for a moment to contemplate

the swift basting that with an insect’s soul on the back

goes away without touching the smallest of leaves?

Oh not to have a sharp verse

so very fine a javelin

to throw over that instant

slipping between the cat and the shoes

its invisible seas, to leave it stuck there,

even softer on the harsh ground

open and already calmed and bleeding

like the fist deer dead in the world’s morning.

I SEE THE NIGHT SOLDIERS

I slept, dreamt or died,

behind the wall I heard the infinite’s mouse screetching:

a world of feathers that suddenly started flying

would not cross lighter on those borrowed minutes’ beams

that today link the room to time through the windows;

and they, the night soldiers, the old poets and some

have not forgotten to sleep, to dream or die,

a sorcerer love for those instants when they played dice

with mirages containing a prairie has preserved for them,

behind the stern face, the bitter gesture with which they ambush their fate:

thirty years ago this spent man drove his heart

to the furnace where almost all of the others burn;

forty years ago he was tempted by his own smile,

a curved finger over the telephone turned the wheel

shutting the trap. Fifty years ago

these teeth decayed by the night ignored

the bad breath of lie in its lair or, burning, refused

to await the eve of a propitious knife

on the back of others, preceding recruits of night.

Sixty years ago this insomnia ignored the frozen,

repeated hand twisting the chicken’s neck with the infarct,

penultimate resource of the conscience of stubborn mistake

that reappears at 3 on the dot in the morning.

Night soldier so long, long ago,

you were not yet you, you were the quill and the paper,

the old tradition of the day’s smile.

It never declines, never ceases, the tenth circle

closing the alleviation of hell:

the gods you betray neither exist nor forgive.

THE SEA OF THE ANCIENT

Never will the sea of the ancient return

to gather the shores created by its waves.

One year wide, a life long,

it sank in the deep mouthful of the bottom.

With it the crews of Erik the Violent

and the peaceful sail of another thief, a Phoenician,

rounded that soft horizon forever

and beneath the chasm that swallowed them all

as a book is shut.

Neither the frowning pirate who was once

tallness and tan and shadow,

nor the trader suffocated beneath a three-cornered hat and titles,

had the power to detain

those other waves that are called hours;

not even the multiple drowned one, that without a name,

can put his head out now

for his courageous persevering

beneath the moon, in loneliness.

Ah, sea of Aeneas and Ulysses

you were not this one and were

the dolphin’s cradle and the spices

and the road of gold and always the Other.

How Portuguese and Spanish they were

when they were those who were at sea.

And the junk of that other history, the unknown,

that opened into it coming down the rivers

like a bough armed with an astrolabe,

with yellow men under the tight silk

keeping their secrets, their road and their signs!

Amidst the flying fish I see

the Roman trirreme riding

and the Greek vessel coming out of danger;

all of these ambitions seeking the Hesperides

stranded in the reef of the minute.

And the Mermaid, the heathenism on board

covered with scales and placed outside,

and officer Leviathan of the Old Testament,

condensed in the white whale

that, in the eighteen hundreds, still cut through

the beloved unforgettable sea of the ancient.

ANIMA BLANDULA

Animula vagula, blandula.

Little soul, vagabond and affectionate.

Adriano

what suffering the call of the abstract

(since thus she calls it , for lack of a better word)

one would say that to be happy or seem to be

it takes the greasy embrace of tripe

to hug as in rocking

a sister without a mind protecting

the arms that hold her,

why not yet used

after so many eras

to a destiny of air without matter?

looking back in sorrow

as hopelessly as Orpheus

euridice the insane

a thing of the night compassionate offers its thin edge

like an idiot discovering an idea in himself

is surprised we find there are things of the night

walking about the day without problems bigger than those of their twins of daylight

when half of the world turns the switches

but what deceit is this, what does he think he switches out?

whereabouts is august

who is winter

what do we know about wednesday

and why is it nine o’clock

the diving spider goes down every abyss

in its bubble

a thin wall of water

saving it from waters

there on the surface the sun of Otherness

the world is wet

one would say that an animal

like a hill

might stretch its neck

to the palm-trees’ tops

that stretch like the rainbow

palm-trees that maybe are not there

and that a winged terror

would find enough room

to mimic and rehearse

in the cloudy sky.

nothing is something but green

nothing is nothing but blue, red without blood

chestnut lacking wood

gray in lack of a stone

frightful colors without things

and in the middle or maybe at one side

of this proud world

a pensive water

just bewildered.

A FRUIT ON THE GRASS

farther on the large political world of language

here the wide quietness of things

at the bottom of the ocean where it lives

how can it be deemed otherwise

in this art exalting

if the first who took the chisel gathered in words

the brightness of the humble color

the traces of that seen

the wide quiet serenity of things

a half is night the other half is deceit

feeling it is watching the world move

thin as an abyss

between time’s blades

and neither reading is enough nor watching suffices

it is so beautiful that its body thinks

there the poet is the soil worm

makes the orchard from the fruit

as in the plum it sees the plum-tree’s shadow

JUST LIKE BY A DREAM’S COMMAND

Let the cautious intelligence or blindfold

allow you to contemplate once in a while

for a few brief seconds

the strange images

that are inside and out of the eyes:

horses of the eighteen hundreds,

men of all times.

The prow that stranded in the ice that then there was.

And before the prow, the wind.

And before the wind, the formative nothingness.

History you are the great sea where we are, drops:

a litre contains me with the giant bear

and the man of tomorrow and Jerjes.

Fickle the glance of a hand slides

holding a spear, new,

like another that is hardly the sight

of basket manufacturing,

the performance of a knife and falls,

swift star in the dark

hardly interrupting.

But wasn’t that girdled, a moment ago,

Urquiza’s lips murmuring something

and then a collapsed sky of arrows,

indeed, just like by a dream’s command

on forgotten roofs,

the nightmare of fire for the sleeping men?

Isn’t that a grandfather of mine staking peasants

by will or by fury,

nor is that, almost at his side, almost,

the other who crossed the sea on the short caravel

and under his name and my height

kept the Callao gates for twenty years,

before San Martín and some vespers?

Ho, by a dream’s command arriving late

and pauses and already goes away before settling down,

there is a strength enough to break the delicate and solid hour

and seek, in the fragment of a minute, the tiny brightness

of a second, intact and whispering in its dust case!

Blessed hallucination, Mahoma on a borrowed horse

crossing that desert to history;

a little cashier embezzles the wildest bank of the West,

is caught in Denver and hungs in Tucson;

Heracles, a duplicate ghost of Euristeus,

raises the cudgel over the world and lowers it in Nemea;

Herman Melville watches a whale for the first time,

I see the pulse and a waiting in his hands;

someone, a morning in 1810, secretly knocks on a door,

enters, is received with distrust and then dismissed;

some naked, brave misers, stand around

an elephant somewhere in France,

kill it and eat it after a five hour struggle,

six remain dead on the reddish grass;

someone drinks gin in a Havana bar

and with hungry waves, history floods,

sinks and swallows him; Sarmiento,

in a Paraguay garden one afternoon,

remembers Benjamin Franklin’s voice

and briefly revives that morning for himself.

I see Sarmiento in a Paraguay garden.

Venus dresses up in fog for her son and pride,

for strong Achilles to hurt his ghost

and so Homer may continue his word

by the kindness of a goddess, as it happens since;

always (though you want it otherwise, always);

Jeanot Martorell, the “son of the hammer”,

invites the king of England to act as an umpire

in his imaginary duels, “a tota sange”,

armorless, which are never materialized

and that is the fervent juice of his literature;

Fernando Pessoa crosses the street, watching

the passing of carriages, and arrives safe and sound

at a tobacco shop where they sell

secret modernity; the rain which is golden

and Jove’s raises its athletes of the duplicated womb;

Kathy Macmillan, who will never have a name,

murders her husband and flees to Rio de Janeiro

with the unsurmountable smile of the very many

who know they have committed the perfect crime;

Walter Benjamin gets a letter addressed to his neighbor

and disdainfully throws it into a basket,

then unwrinkles and reads it carefully;

Gilles de Rais, two leagues from the citadel,

watches pensive how Jean d’Arc

slowly ascends to heaven in a cloud of fumes;

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with his wife and tears

in the eyes, fervently attends a spiritist meeting

very near Hyde Park; Abel shatters Cain’s head

and urgently changes his brother’s name,

blasphemously winking his eye to a place among the clouds;

Francis Picabia stoically stands the rebukes

of his father-in-law, who scolds him for his bad associates;

fervent Pygmalion is Narcissus in love with his statue;

a president cancels another one from a gift list;

someone tightens a bow in the infinite bay, misses the target

and the deer again safe sinks

in the green waves of the forest;

two men in silence drill a safe-box

and a third one awaits them, thinking only of his paralyzed

daughter while toying with the car radio tuning;

and Faeton putting aside the reins for a moment, hardly

a moment, in the deepest and most precise zenith, to contemplate

the Pleiades and falls. Eneas waters two shadows:

one is the darkest corner of Italy and the other is Tyresias,

knowing the hours and the course of hours;

so, I water double the present where I stand and that I dream of,

to contemplate the past and half see myself in its shadows.

How I wish to see you, Ronda. And if after being dead

death is seeing you, dead and without closing the eyes

I want to be, multiple, in all your landscapes.

REAL LIFE

what will be opens the poem the book the note

the biography of a X or a IV george albert othon or charles

it is but the happening of the wind amidst the trees

the reason of a falling leaf

the imaginary parallel of what cannot truly be heard seen

touched or is perhaps the sketch among lies

just like making a pond water speak up

thus everything is the enigma

so, everything is the enigma

and despite everything, it is the enigma

DESIDERATA

all the heaviness of this smoky town goes down to your labyrinths

and the eyelids will also lower their deadly breathing

the world’s big artery has stopped

for everyday’s terrible bread to pass to a dream kept awake

before grief night shows its healthy teeth

I have renounced as well heaven and hell

that your promise lights like a garden

fear hasn’t got for what body for what masks

for what the hand extended like a black beggar

and the man is strong and beautiful like an old metaphor

how to name you for him to be as fast as your happy misfortune

as if someone returned from dust by the name

o sunset invading mercy standing on the lightning

when mystery touches you like a scandal

in jealousy of jurisdiction for a bird’s bone

to you who lick the purity of your womb on the knees of ether

that slowly raises you from the journey sands

always on a trip about the numbers’ forest

if everything I carry tied up is loose anywhere

it had to be a huge blood stain

to wake up the veils where the wild and blind nightmare

also dawns

always by night always by day

from the mountains that are going to grow old

to the port without fish through the stones

my things fleeing away in excitement

like a drill they design the wind’s veins

where even the same light is dark and is yours

it still turns pale in your linen memory

I can walk about all things

seeking you and shouting it is time the time

of the dishevelled prophets who saw the Grail

in the locusts’ flesh on a light blue and a blue

delicately melted in the eye’s center

all I know is not good enough to know

if one doesn’t also return from the matter

of which skies, stars are made of

the arduous tearing ourselves away

in the hope of arriving at the bottom of your black cave

but emptiness frightens you when it shows on your lips

though no light beam cancelled your name

land o land where appeals sink

and hatred dies as soon as it feeds of your slow gods

sleeps stubbing the age of your bluish waters of the world’s great Letheos

where taste is prone to remember a jealous god’s countenance

lend me the gentle glance of your ghosts lend it to me

that just for a moment I want to see eternally repeated

the impure descent of your hair as pale as the priestesses of the year

our god lies in flames on the naked plain

night is a piece of news

but only you have that endless power of shadows

where I wait and hold up like a man

protected by centuries

when the room of suicide

has for him the door illuminated

(the majestic dying of a foreigner

being carved in the midday choir)

your shadows seek for me

the jingling golden hills

the well tuned mount and the natural singing line.

HEIRS OF FLESH AND SHADOW

The finger directing the transit of the living

set this double trap in every long shadow:

the knot of nerves joined to the body that is going to die

has in its center that flame shining

in all its midnights, in all its mid-days

and a black whip for each one and coming from afar

and inheriting the shadow

(damned, a thousand times damned through deaths

and resurrections, that night flake

where pain is immortal and nothingness watches).

Look: a man beats another in the discolored yesterday

or in the echo of his childhood hurls the black flake away

and his son follows him in his son and in another.

Nobody knows what words or gestures he has directed to the future,

or understands there is nothing not expanding

its waves in the heart. We are the water exposed

with the helpless island and its memory,

that mute inhabitant who does not understand and is astonished.

We roam with afflictions for ourselves and others

sowing black snow, there is in the middle of love

a throne for that shadow and in the center of a kiss

a word said, a gesture made by a perpetual dead one.

And from dust they did not know why they were doing that

and they ignored the cause of the world

and from the future they did not expect the weight

of that which is not going to die.

STREET LIGHT

Is it immortal, the force going up and down

the seed to the tree-top and man to the dead,

that one extending space and tying up the various times,

that one drilling with stars the vast sky

and setting one by one the objects of day time

that one, flowing back in you and in me,

from ahead to birth, that one prolonging

the shadow of those birds from the first morning?

Has it got other ways through the maze,

does it know it as it mixes the seas with the seas,

this ancient one raining on your house and at Mycenae,

on a yard surrounded by lions? Its name

are the names and what escapes and lives

from dawn to dawn beyond lips.

Amidst the earthy piles stirred by their tracks

I see it passing, as those shapes where it scarcely inhabits

I am seeing me questioning it and what it has left in me

bends sorrowful when contemplating it inside and far,

like the light on the street looks at

the wild thunderbolt cracking the storm.

I SING OF WHAT WAS LIKELY

What could have been floats over this

as the thick cloud from crematories

rides on the fresh soil of stockings,

of shoes, of shreds from garments and flowers,

you who are not heedful of the traces of the possible

among moments and days, listen, listen

to the muffled noise with which it complains nailed to the stone

of impossible: but might have been.

It might have been a notorious instant,

when the evening breaks over the madman’s mind,

a general approval of grace

of the leaf brilliancy under the blood drop,

it might have been the deep yes,

ringing in the world’s throat,

to the minute bewitchment of a second’s distance

between the finger and the flame of the immense;

alas, how carried away by eternity

had the black hole then kept silent,

the loose beast setting fire on the vespers

and the anniversary of the poor victory

of these things that now, around your mouth,

throw the nourishment from the open air,

fruits of the sad sentence,

flashes of lightning of the present:

it bellows down there and in the lonely hours you can hear

that other beast, that of lights,

which tears its heart away from the eye

and from the sea keeps what is dry of its breed.

It’s not a mystery, you know and the insult of the evidence

is personal and serious

because it touches you in the night’s center

out in the sea: it might have been and got lost

the blame on those steps reaching the side,

yours and mine in every last evening.

A flag floats:

it’s that of treason on houses and streets,

on the sky avenues of the imaginary,

he has got lost and tonight, when you happily celebrate

the death of his blood, makes a toast,

toast with a wine of the dead the beheaded dawn,

the bomb of stars left in the lurch.

It might have been

and was but the farce of a dream

(a trap set to misfortune),

the arabesque designing the day on the air

like in a dead man’s pocket,

nothing less helpless there was than the bed

where this you give dreamt a probable fortune,

this you throw to the cycle of the barren,

to the plan where you leave it.

AND THEN, THE WIDE NIGHT COMING DOWN ON EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE

And then the wide night that comes down on everything and everyone

placed its carpet where she flies, herself

transfigured indeed, by a happening announcing soft trills

and it is the way death has to say: this is mine,

the decanter that pours that your ocean and your island of shipwreck,

spilling itself like a lover on nothingness returning,

I am that shell telling of its joy of persisting in a time

that is its own and that repeats: look, I’m your gift, fury of the day,

and I am the force of hair and heel

and that coming down the dead man to the flowers

and up again. Man who in the white dawn

is like the profile of the dog among the waves,

counts his bones in the blood and his blood whines

and is the wide night after the yellow sunset and is the day.

Behind those enigmas, yours and mine,

the same spectre whispers: but touch it

and the same crystal palace on top of the imaginary

hill opens, yes, it opens

for the foolish prince of the high mark

and is received by the lame who is a servant of the Devil,

this same Devil who is by my table.

Fury, fury in the agony of the light that butler

of the tables of dawn recovering his shape

in the seaweed buds, in the gray summarizing

Adam’s sacrifice, in the blue starting

to perpetuate step by step,

nobody is the whining and this trace coming

from the sensitive sycamore, that one which was sorry

to hurt the bellows of the beardless blacksmith of hours,

knows that its destiny is that of the log on top of the flame

and that its name is night

THE SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT

This is the summer of our discontent.

The clouds that will humiliate winter are on the sea.

It is still soaring, with furious chores invoking,

that which responded alone; it’s rare and fugitive

the bird of hope when time is aiming at it.

This is the summer of our discontent

and we take a care that surprises and extinguishes us

as soon as we step into a dream.

Is the restless line of those we see returning

from their vicious winters, missing the lying sap

to the bite of its very dry fruits

or is it the love that in all mirrors,

hardly a summer ago, reflected

its horrifying mask of god Janus,

which is at the same time a dead man

and the burning smile of young Spring?

It was maybe the patient knife that in the fields

awaited the bud and the height of our green effort,

when the wet muzzle of the falling sand

gave away our secret leaps: nothing else

it’s that days are time’s dogs.

The pack surrounds us in the summer of our discontent.

We’ll end up astonished contemplating the slap

neither good nor bad of the dice that the year has loaded

We are the man who one afternoon of his

goes up the deceitful tree of his only certainty

and as soon as his sole litany ends

he discovers his neighbor riding another tree

neither the spurs will be of any use to them

nor money, fodder of desire, will serve.

Underneath a day barks where a week grunts

and, hidden, a month whistles.

We will be hung by that tree,

that won’t burn in the winter fire.

I t will be darkness as soon as this summer

of our discontent puts out its birthday.

I want these green flames to shine

as the winter as a guest laughs at the party

that a man, forlorn, offers with his ghosts.

Let my gift be a hothouse pain,

patiently watered, that from its hollow petals

emerge the stubborn embryo in its iron cradle

as a summer for immortelles.

I do not want to go anywhere

and go to none not manured by the dead

for I believe neither in widowers’ dreams

nor in the quiet vigil of the ancestors,

I want a miracle greater than restoring

the cosmic tenderness of every Golden Age

or forging a fog of calm in the world.

Throw me the keys that don’t guard hope,

O, give me from that case not carried by Pandora

an explosion so wide, so wide as the first one.

LET EZRA POUND SPEAK

If you have nothing to say keep silent

let Ezra Pound speak

from the shadows the splendid old man

from the subtle watermark

the magnificent old man

shows you the genuine banknotes of his fortune

and all shine legitimate fish

of an infinite river which indeed

that one never stops.

If you have nothing to say keep silent

the eminent gentleman the variegated ladies

who lived and died and were born for this only cause

cannot allow by their side

the stuttering of a dwarf

the limping of a counterfeiter

denouncing that the gold of their verbs

lacks that thin watermark

that savage finesse the impeccable spot

not adorning the head of a written animal

-which goes through the paper only for an instant-

but comes out of the bottomless animal

of the live viscera where royal blood runs

-that one where the red of the crimson comes from-

and throbs outside like a monster of light

like an image without other chapel than every thing

of every universe possible or impossible

which could indeed be adored

standing and without veils without altars or anything

-not even acolytes-

by the name of our lady of verbs

hallowed by manure and nerves

by eclipses and novas O you

high and low sublime malicious

poetry reigning over the extended night

and the narrow day.

IN THE HUGE AFTERNOON

The kneeling man bent further and fell

and cried, sunk behind the veils

hiding us from foreigners,

there where nothing draws a smile accomplice,

where the jugglery of the day bigger