I
In the ductile night, with a
gladiola in your house
In the night, listen,
Oh fragile vanity in my arms,
And your dream weighs heavily like a pulse of the river.
Further up along the orchards
Test, verify my weakness and my strength.
The path I ignore until I find your step, your trail
Warm in the ground,
The birth of the new day.
______________________________
II
You are not with me. I ignore your image. I do not inhabit your great oblivion.
The years will pass. A chaotic rapture will occur in the south like a blessing.
With the magic wealth of the encounter, come back to me, climb your silent fervor,
your begging for journeys,
your night and your midday.
You appear.
Your orbit defies all distance.
Then, to illuminate the present, you and I caress the scar of our ancient love.
______________________________
IV
So as to emerge with the whistle of the serpent and the
birds of paradise
At the pace of the afternoons
The miraculous trapeze of your desire is life
And the diamond within my lover
And through the purple red (in the dream) the
white windows in my vigil
And when they love me I forget my own presence
When they listen to me I forget my own audience
When they call me human I am a black horse
because of nostalgia
And if I am saved it will not be through pity
If I die it will not be through suicide
If I am reborn it will not be in the resurrection of the flesh
I enter the stage unarmed before vowels and words with
fast circular oscillations of parallel luster
with the live fish in the net and the meaningless
interrogation.
______________________________
V
When you climb the heights
I scream in your ear:
We are mixed in with the great evil of the earth.
I always feel strange.
I barely
Survive
The panic of the nights.
Wolf within me, unknown woman,
We are guests on the illusory hill,
The place loved by the poor;
They
Have descended with the appearance
Of the sun,
Until I am moistened with many roses,
And I have conquered the ridiculous
With my tenderness,
Listening to the heart.
______________________________
VI
Helen is earth seaweed
Ocean wave.
She exists because she owns the nostalgia
Of these elements,
But she knows it,
She dreams,
And trusts,
Standing on the rock and the coral of the abysses.
Actually, Helen
Knows the simple things,
Because before being a damsel
She was Siren and Mermaid.
And before being
Siren and Mermaid,
She swam in the whirlwind, in the number, in the fire.
I must have fallen on the trail, and recalled,
Oh delirious host;
Right there, where the afternoon and the dusk are appeased,
I was set aside.
I had another love,
Pure like ecstasy,
Fragile like fantasy,
Absolute like my other love.
I heard a trumpet of fog in the desert
My falcons emerged from the foliage.
In all seasons
In autumn or in spring
Helen is earth seaweed
Ocean wave.
______________________________
VII
In our vigils
In our workshops
In our somber parties
On any day
The beautiful swan
Sings
Petrified
By the rainbow
With its radiant kingfisher tongue.
On any day
I feared for you
On several of the village flanks
Amid the ruins
But you would say to me:
The blind flesh of my age
Will never be consumed by flames.
And old age with half-closed eyes, maliciously pointing at
A bonfire, A sphinx
Would say to me
As a reply:
It will be consumed by flames
It carries the unmistakable signs of the other kingdom.
Later, there was nothing to do but begin:
Smoke
Sandalwood
Infernal sulphur
So much lost time crushes me
And the nostalgia of my first journey
And a few black birds
Who pass in the sky
When I throw the cards.
Listen to me:
Have my great artifices ceased spinning?
Do I move their dominating arms?
The temptations, like
Somnambulant panthers
Behind the night?
Lamps, inaccessible peaks and insomnias of
Real life.
Out of place, beyond the hubbub, speechless
Like a modest father.
______________________________
IX
Not as clumsy
But
Without nostalgia,
Without memories,
Without a pulse,
Without my breathing, my scream
The splinter of my absence,
I must skin myself
On the window hinges,
Choose the wrong specter, and forget it.
Pass the water
That spreads as in a fountain
By the hands of the mute girl.
With pure vanity and love,
I babble, shoeless on the porch.
Denying myself the end of being
Nothingness
The blue harbor
The whiteness of the precipice.
______________________________
X
8000 occult demons
Scream at us that insomnia
Is a land of exile, without leopards or rivers.
The conductor (of the human flock)
Must survive with what still remains
Amid the dew of the dawning pupils of the world.
That’s why he doesn’t look at the compass nor at the card table
Where the passengers sit.
He must scrutinize the ravenous tree line
In the arteries of the island.
For the sake of our shipwrecked bones, for whatever floats
Above the water’s flame
Or in absolute oblivion.
______________________________
XII
I often identify myself with someone else who doesn’t reveal his name or his features.
Between this person and me, both strangely rancorous, beatitude and cruelty reign. We
love each other and slit each other’s throats. We are sufferers and small. In our beds lie
an iguana, a musty rose (for rainy days) and the somnambulant cats that climbed the tiled
rooftops last year.
We, who don’t cross borders, remain in the threshold, in our attics, always expecting
better times.
The perspicacious eye discovers my own ignorance in this fellow man, my lack of
features in front of any mirror.
Now I walk, naked in the desert. I walk in the desert with my hands.
______________________________
XVII
I don’t want to swell up with words.
I think about the Indians and about sailboats
And I watch the bunch of magnolias
That drops in the spray of the waterfall.
A ballad so nostalgic it no longer means anything
Is heard along the other shore.
I see, dancing among the green leaves and the fire,
The ancient warrior,
Free from risk, like in a playground.
When the Ocean is unassailable,
When human limitation is great, and
we run in search of partridges, corn and
the somnolent phosphorous like rain,
I speak to the ancient warrior once again.
The invisible guest, adorned with beautiful feathers,
Detains me in the threshold of his house,
With a blind
Gesture
Of love.
______________________________
XVIII
My creature of habit observes and guards me.
Moves its long tail. Comes to me
At an imprecise hour.
Devours me every day, at any second.
When I go to the office, it asks me:
“Why do you work
Right
Here?”
And I answer, very quietly, almost whispering:
For no reason, no reason.
And since I’m superstitious, I knock on wood
Suddenly,
So it will disappear.
I am illogically helpless:
From my knees up
This coming spring
My creature of habit steals the sun from me
Along with the fleeting clarity of pedestrians.
I have never been faithful to the moon or the rain or the
pebbles on the beach.
My creature of habit takes me by the wrists,
dries my tears.
At an imprecise hour
It descends from the sky.
At an imprecise hour
It sips the steam of my poor soup.
At an imprecise hour
When I atone for my thirst
It walks by with jugs of wine.
At an imprecise hour
It will kill me, pick up my bones
And once my bones are gathered in a great sack, it will make of me
A small boat,
A diminutive bubble on the beach.
Then I will really
Be faithful
To the moon
The rain
The sun
And the pebbles on the beach.
Then,
A strange rumor will persist
Around the tree and the victim;
It will persist…
Forever sweeping
The roses,
The ductile leaves
And the wind.