‘The little girl made of timber didn’t arrive by walking:’
LXVIII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’
(Figurehead from a ship)
The little girl made of timber didn’t arrive by walking:
there she was, all of a sudden, sitting among the cobbles,
ancient flowers, of the sea, were a coronet on her forehead,
her gaze was filled by deep rooted sadness.
There she rested, gazing, at our empty existence,
the doing, and being, and going, and coming, all over Earth,
and day was discolouring its measure of petals.
She watched us, without seeing, the girl-child of timber.
The girl-child who was crowned by the ancient waters,
sat there gazing, with eyes overwhelmed:
she knew we are living in a distant trawl-net,
of time, and water, and waves, and sounds, and rain,
and don’t know if we’re beings, or if we are her dreaming.
This is the fable of the girl who’s made of timber.
Walking Around
From: ‘Residencia en la tierra II’
It so happens I’m tired of being a man.
It so happens I enter clothes shops and movie-houses,
withered, impenetrable, like a swan made of felt
sailing the water of ashes and origins.
The smell of a hairdresser’s has me crying and wailing.
I only want release from being stone or wool.
I only want not to see gardens and businesses,
merchandise, spectacles, lifts.
It so happens I’m tired of my feet and toenails,
my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I’m tired of being a man.
Still it would be a pleasure
to scare a lawyer with a severed lily
or deal death to a nun with a poke in the ear.
It would be good
to go through the streets with an emerald knife
and shout out till I died of cold.
I don’t want to go on being just a root in the shadows,
vacillating, extended, shivering with dream,
down in the damp bowels of earth,
absorbing it, thinking it, eating it every day.
I don’t want to be so much misfortune,
I don’t want to go on as a root or a tomb,
a subterranean tunnel, just a cellar of death,
frozen, dying in pain.
This is why, Monday, the day, is burning like petrol,
when it sees me arrive with my prison features,
and it screeches going by like a scorched tire
and its footsteps tread hot with blood towards night.
And it drives me to certain street corners, certain damp houses,
towards hospitals where skeletons leap from the window,
to certain cobbler’s shops stinking of vinegar,
to alleyways awful as abysses.
There are sulphur-coloured birds and repulsive intestines,
hanging from doorways of houses I hate,
there are lost dentures in coffee pots
there are mirrors
that ought to have cried out from horror and shame,
there are umbrellas everywhere, poisons and navels.
I pass by calmly, with eyes and shoes,
with anger, oblivion,
pass by, cross through offices, orthopedic stores,
and yards where clothes hang down from wires:
underpants, towels, and shirts, that cry
slow guilty tears.
Enigmas
From:‘Canto General’
You ask what the crab offers, between its claws of gold,
and I say: The sea will tell you.
You ask what the sea-squirt hopes for in its translucent bell.
What can it hope for?
I say that it waits on its time, as you do.
You question for whom the algal Macrocystis offers its embraces.
Unloose it, unloose it, in a certain ocean, and a certain time, that I know.
Though you turn, for my answer to the narwhal’s malicious ivory,
I say that you wait for a darker reply,
how the sea-unicorn suffered the lance.
It may be you question the halcyon’s plumage,
tremoring,
in the pure womb of the southern seas?
Now, on the crystalline house of the polyp you twine
new demands, threshing it to the husk?
You want to know the matter electric, caught on the forks of the deep?
The stalactite’s armour that extends as crystal?
The spear of the angler-fish, the music stretched-out
in the gulf, like a thread amongst waters?
I say to you that the ocean knows it, the life
of its circlings vast as the sands, pure and innumerable,
and between the red vine-clusters, time has brightened
the stone of the petals, the light of medusas,
and the branches are threshed in the web of the corals,
from the flowing horn’s infinite nacre.
I am the empty net that hangs,
beyond men, rendered dead by the shadowy waters,
fingers grown used to the triangle, measured
by the shy hemisphere of orange-flowers.
I came, like you, penetrating
the interminable starlight,
in the net of the self, in the night, and found naked self,
the sole catch, the fish noosed in the wind.