Witches
Tell me, oh! Old wise witches
Saturday doctors,
if awaits me good fortune
or awaits me bad.
*******Seek for yourselves
in nights of moon
among the ugliest, among fistfuls of weeds,
*******among the hidden
*******who hide the strangest things:
smoke rising from bats
or terrifying toads,
the dead-black wings of
hapless owls,
and undulating vipers:
every bug that brings disgust
*******Oh! Witches,
Saturday doctors.
Let them growl in the pot,
inside clay bowls
pour in foul grease
brought to you by dragons
crawling out of the graves
of the still-rotting dead,
*******as howl
hyenas in the fields.
And let them boil, let them roar
after you’ve cast your conjurations
after you’ve clad your faces with contortions
demonic emulations,
after the columns have begun to slither like snakes
with fire and fatuous smoke
*******that in the cavern
speak predictions,
*******Oh! Witches,
Saturday doctors.
Stir in long shadows,
with long fangs,
*******and let frightful demons rise
*******so that, in pale
*******nocturnal assembly
I can be told of the fortune
reserved for fays,
*******Oh! Witches,
Saturday doctors.
*******—Crac, crec, croc.
Black cat, mewing.
*******—Crac, crec, croc.
Feeble dog, howling.
*******croc, croc.
So that, in pale
nocturnal assembly,
I can be told of the fortune
reserved for fays
*******Oh! Witches
Saturday doctors…
“What moon phase do you seek?”
*******crac, crec, croc
The one shining over Cyprus
amid the love of roses.
Is there still one for me…?
*******—Crac, crec, croc
“How long have you held life’s harm?”
Oh, I am an old man! Today I pressed my hand against
the twenty eighth ledge…
“Oh! The horror!”
Smoke, rises,
*******Croc, croc, croc
Flees, the cloud.
(And rose in flight the old women,
*******the perverse doctors,
like a famished flock of furies
with sinister mocking and yelling,
*******making a thousand twisted faces.
Their long manes like ruffled feathers
*******unfurled and black,
like the long crest of long
*******snaking smoke.)