Collected Poems

SOME BEASTS

Clarity, uttermost strength: My soul is fulfilled in you. SOME BEASTS (from the Spanish of Pablo Neruda) It was the twilight of the iguana. From the rainbow-arch of thebattlements, his long tongue like a lance sank down in the green leaves, and a swarm of ants, monks with feet chanting, crawled off into the jungle; the guanaco, thin as oxygen in the wide peaks of cloud, went along, wearing his shoes of gold, while the llama opened his honest eyes on the breakableneatness of a world full of dew. The monkeys braided a sexual thread that went on and on along the shores of the dawn, demolishing walls of pollen and startling the butterflies of Muzo into flying violets. It was the night of the alligators, the pure night, crawling with snouts emerging from ooze, and out of the sleepy marshes the confused noise of scaly plates returned to the ground where they began. The jaguar brushes the leaves with a luminous absence, the puma runs through the branches like a forest fire, while the jungle's drunken eyes burn from inside him. The badgers scratch the river's feet, scenting the nest 96 whose throbbing delicacy they attack with red teeth. And deep in the huge waters the enormous anaconda lies like the circle around the earth, covered with ceremonies of mud, devouring, religious. THE HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU, III (from the Spanish of Pablo Neruda) The human soul was threshed out like maize in the endless granary of defeated actions, of mean things that happened, to the very edge of endurance, and beyond, and not only death, but many deaths, came to each one: each day a tiny death, dust, worm, a light flicked off in the mud at the city's edge, a tiny death with coarse wings pierced into each man like a short lance and the man was besieged by the bread or by the knife, the cattle-dealer: the child of sea-harbors, or the dark captain of the plough, or the rag-picker of snarled streets: everybody lost heart, anxiously waiting for death, the short death of every day: and the grinding bad luck of every day was like a black cup that they drank, with their hands shaking. TRUMPETS (from the German of Georg Trakl) Under the trimmed willows, where brown children are playing And leaves tumbling, the trumpets blow. A quaking of cemeteries. SOME TRANSLATIONS 97 ...