Chicago
Under the crossword of concrete beams,
between the peroxide bitches
and the gastric ulcer advertisements,
besieged by the bells of salvation’s armies
contaminated by soot and sugar
and humiliated by insulted Negroes,
a greyer desire awakens
in every desire.
And whiter gentlemen greet me,
a stranger in their nest,
a friend and fellow pest.
There is reason here to hang,
reason enough, no one gives a dang
between forgetting and release.
A verse from Luke won’t help you here,
nor a leather dragon on your back
nor chewing on the almond herb.
I’ll be replaced here soon
by a mouth full of grit.
Travelling
For nine days the lost donkey stood up to the buzzards,
now its remains are reeking on the roadside.
The sun, a stag that wants to catch the stars, those vultures,
doesn’t touch the riders,
begging by the wheels.
Girls who keep house in wooden boxes
make offerings to Jesus and Zapata.
On the way from Puerto Marqués to Oaxaca
I throw three hundred and eighty butts at wizened old men.
Uxmal
On the river sometimes when the strange weather
bursts into flame
a skeleton will sometimes creak
like a piece of furniture or a badly healed jaw.
This is what the natives hear. Unmoving.
Expressing no desires,
They ask no questions quickly shutting off, close-lipped,
they live in singular devastation.
Above the anthracite fields where Mayas
played ballgames in front of the House of the Dwarf
a vulture flicks its wing and swoops down on an anteater in the grass.
This is what we hear. And take photos of the prey.
Later we descend backwards from the Rain God’s altar
to avoid offending his eyes
and land in nettles.
(For the ladies every niche is dripping with phallic significance.)
We live in multiple bedazzlement.
She
1
Two horses in the hay, a grey and one with a blaze,
tied together and stamping,
a winter’s tale about that,
my memory of us already
homework for later days.
The contagion that transforms me
(a would-be hero becomes a shepherd
racing flames across the field)
distorts our gestures, animals and clouds.
In rooms I hear myself ask about before
and in the role of croaking judge
I speak of our old arbitrary horses
law and cancer.
2
Even if for you and me the world
has long been a domain of prickles and sponges,
we still ride down avenues.
Cured of stars but not yet addicted
to the manifold silence
we warm ourselves on the simple weather
and play in the hairy year
as if jumping at branches full of apples.
Playing, but dozens of horse flies from outside bite
and snitches from somewhere else cut me down to size.
“Look, a kite,” you say
and I see you burnt by phosphorus.
“Look, a beetle,” you say
and I see you crushed by a tank.
And beyond this, I sometimes think, you betray my voice,
but speaking without you is a plea to a mirror,
fleeing into the worst kind of wood.
Often you are my voice, you,
a trap for hare’s tails, a cuckoo’s egg,
you, my bed.
6
Sometimes, outside of your presence,
I want to slide silence into the tipping day,
delaying the dissipation.
But outside muddled circles
the dancer does not live.
In every room your fussing lies in wait
in every breath your hooks still try their luck
and you chatter away, my marsupial,
yes, you, who conjugates my misery
as sweetly as the verb to fuck.
Sleep tight tonight, milady,
and eat your dreams raw.
Tomorrow my marrowbones will be ready again
for your miraculous mouths.
The Sphinx Speaks
You there on three legs, night is falling in the peaks,
an abyss is looming ahead
and will end your bitter drivel.
Seagulls still blow through your life,
but your shins are chalky
and your sowing is done.
No lamp in this debris, no watcher on the cliffs
where you shrink. For all that the taste
of almond still shakes you up,
as much as you’re an ape in your delusions,
you here on three legs, give up the fight
and say goodnight to your children.
A seagull is already skimming the sea
to catch you up with salt and sand.
The Panama Canal
When the news came — no news came.
We drilled to the stream’s grave and carved
through the hyacinths that smothered its bed
when the news came.
And the news, translated and suppressed, pierced our chests
and broke the already motionless rock in our crotch.
It was a judgement on our customs,
a white law, scarcely explained:
“No more fumes, no pipes, no powders or herbs,
no sniffing or sucking the life-giving grass.”
Then we sat down and became the slush
in the sludge of the dredging machines.
With transplanted brains, banished to the blood-sapping cold,
we sat down by the foreign sea.
Strangled our parents with their queues, hung our children
in a bunch from the crane
and waited under the buzzards for the surging tide
to catch us in its cloud-sown waves.
Message to the Population [1962]
(an appeal in an extremely free verse form, delivered at Amsterdam’s Krasnapolsky Hotel on 1 January 1962, and dedicated to two of those present: Remco Campert and Simon Vinkenoog)
~ ~ ~
My very dear friends,
Sometimes I tell a story (as one might expect of a poet)
About the winter which, in the white night,
Sends a flock of seagulls over the besieged city.
And then you nod, “Right, that’s a poet talking.”
And if in a romance I wish to record
The lamentations of the people in their gardens
You whisper, “Sure.”
Because I say so, because I am a poet.