Collected Poems

WHITE ROSE

when the waters come toward me. Let us always sail out. Let us taste the marvellous song, the song spoken by the lower lips of desire. Oh beautiful virginity. The saltless breeze passes. From the distance, I breathe marrows, hearing the profound score, as the surf hunts for its keys. And if we banged into the absurd, We shall cover ourselves with the gold of owning nothing, and hatch the still unborn wing of the night, sister of the orphaned wing of the day, that is not really a wing since it is only one. WHITE ROSE (from the Spanish of Cesar Vallejo) I feel all right. Now a stoical frost shines in me. It makes me laugh, this ruby-colored rope that creaks in my body. Endless rope, like a spiral descending from evil . . . rope, bloody and clumsy, shaped by a thousand waiting daggers. SOME TRANSLATIONS 101 Because it goes in this way, braiding its rolls of funeral crepe, and because it ties the quivering cat of Fear to the frozen nest, to the final fire. Now surrounded by light I am calm. And out on my Pacific a shipwrecked coffin mews. A DIVINE FALLING OF LEAVES (from the Spanish of Ce'sar Vallejo) Moon: royal crown of an enormous head, dropping leaves into yellow shadows as you go. Red crown of a Jesus who broods tragically, softly over emeralds! Moon: reckless heart in heaven, why do you row toward the west in that cup filled with blue wine, whose hull is defeated and sad? Moon: it is no use flying anyway, so you go up in a flame of scattered opals: maybe you are my heart, who is like a gypsy, •who loafs in the sky, shedding poems like tears! . . . OUR DAILY BREAD (from the Spanish of Ce'sar Vallejo) Breakfast is drunk down . . . Damp earth of the cemetery gives off the fragrance of the precious blood. City of winter . . . the mordant crusade IO2 (for Alejandro Gamboa) ...