Poem
(“Our love”)
Our love lies not within our chaste
and separate genitals; our love lies
neither in our mouths, nor in our hands:
our love safeguards itself, pulsing
in the pure blood of our eyes.
My love and your love wait for death
to rob us of our bones, of tooth and nail,
wait for the day in the valley when
only your eyes and my eyes united remain,
gazing at each other outside their orbits’ range,
rather like two suns, or like one.
Segregation No. 1
(after a cultured primitive painter)
I, my mother, my two brothers,
and many humble Peruvians
dug a deep hole, deep down,
where we hide,
because up above everything is owned,
everything is under lock and key,
sealed tight,
because up above everything is spoken for:
a tree’s shade, every single flower,
fruits, a roof, wheels,
water, pencils;
so we chose to sink down,
down to the bottom of the earth,
deeper than we’d ever sunk before,
far away from the bosses—
on this day, Sunday—
far, far away from the landlords,
huddled in the dens of small creatures,
because up above
there are a few who run everything,
who write, who sing, who dance,
who speak elegantly,
while we, red with shame,
want only to disintegrate
in itsy bitsy pieces.
Oh Cybernetic Fairy
Oh Cybernetic Fairy
when will you fix it so that the bones of my hands
move happily
to write at last what I desire
whenever it should please me to do so
and the casings of my secret organs
have smooth and peaceful features
in the final hours of the day
while blood circulates like a balm through the length of my body
Amanuensis
Even as I’m collapsing on the floor, panting,
exhausted to the bone, all broken down,
still, all day long, I toil, moving mountains
from here to there, heaving and coughing,
my tongue hanging out a hundred thousand lengths,
falling to pieces just as my poor parents did;
and all this, in fact, because of my barren brain
and the stock market and draft board and mean boss-men—
they march on, leaving me stuck at the bottom of the heap;
so I am stuffed to the gullet and can do no more,
bent with shame at my daughters’ feet,
just a poor amanuensis of Peru.
Sestina: Mea Culpa
Forgive me, Dad, Mom, because my error
was the birthplace of your unnamable damage,
since that time when first my brains
wove the knotted mesh of deeds
with the twisted ropes I found in the back,
this hole where I lie captive ‘til my death.
Like a hot-air balloon released upon my death,
swollen with the bitter gall of errors,
my conscience will rise up from out back,
for to die like this, fenced in by so much damage,
is in all the world the most wretched deed;
not the fate of a sophisticated brain.
But this is the nonsense of a bewildered brain,
not to be revived, not even in death,
and in truth it is an unendurable deed
that the soul devote itself to committing errors
until, brought low by all the damage,
the body turns to dust, stuck in the back.
With my love life and career consigned to the back
of the line by exclusive design of my brains,
I am left like this by all the deadly damage,
even at the threshold, at the moment of death,
which itself was wrought in welding errors
to the heavy ingots of my life’s deeds.
Dad, Mom, your sweetest deeds—
how I soured them, just languishing in the back,
lost in the forest of errors;
and so distressed you were by my poor brain—
hounded by firebrands in the lair of death,
trapped beneath the flood of all that damage.
Because error engages the wheels of damage,
Because error engages the wheels of damage,
upon erring I damaged you, such an ugly deed,
pitching you so early to your death,
and all the while I lay unmoving in the back,
a slave to the will of my rat’s nest of a brain,
crude origin of the deadliest errors.
If my brain stays stuck, Mom, Dad, in the back,
may this be its last deed in the face of death:
to compensate the damage and to purge the errors.
Never to Leave Again
When, when will I come back again,
in what minute, day, year, or century,
to the sacred little corner where my mistress is,
a hidden spot, one she keeps for me,
and by the grace of her exalted flesh
there lie inside and never leave again?
I want to visit that place again, to go
to the central point eternally,
to enter the secret valley there,
and in her my body and soul thus congealed.
I desire nothing more than to return
to where yesterday I had a fleeting dream,
to cross the threshold with a confident step,
forever and ever there to remain,
not as master of an earthly lair
but as king of the world; the whole universe.
Know this, my parents…
Know this, my parents, oh know it well:
an insect cannot be translated as a man,
but a man is indeed translatable as insect!;
perhaps you didn’t think much of it when
here on earth, without meaning to, you killed
some poor insect,
who had, in distant woods, in the furthest, safest spot,
stayed tucked away in the darkness there
to elude the human eye,
by light of day or under cover of night,
—didn’t you think, I ask you, that in time
a few of your beloved sons
would become just so, insects defenseless and meek,
despite even your thousand pains
to guarantee that at all times
they would have the weight and measure of human things?
Epigram V
These thousand newborn drafts
sterile Aristarco
utterly disdains,
though he only marginally prefers
those obscure paleo-drafts
written by a younger quill
on an immaculate page.
But why such vile blindness
if in the new and in the old poems alike
that dreadful fear lashes with the same rage:
yesterday in the face of unforgiving life,
today because death is already lying in wait?
