where we dress,
there’s not, there Is no one: only leaves
opened up wide.
And always the suits letting go
by themselves, from the hangers
like ghastly guiding pointers,
and departing without bodies, vacant,
even to the prudent hint
of a grand wing stock with causes
and limits fried deep.
Right down to the bone!
[JM]
L
Cerberus four times
per day his padlock wields, opening
closing our sternums, with winks
we comprehend perfectly.
With astounded melancholic breeches,
childish in transcendental disarray,
standing, the poor ole man is adorable.
He jokes with the prisoners, chockfull
the groins with jabs. And lunkhead even
gnaws on some crust for them; but always
just doing his job.
In between the bars he sticks the fiscal
point, unseen, hoisting up the phalanx
of his pinky,
on the trail of what I say,
what I eat,
what I dream.
The raven wants there nevermore be insides,
and how we ache from this that Cerberus wants.
In a clockwork system, the imminent,
pythagorean! ole man plays
breadthwise in the aortas. And only
from time to night, by night
he somewhat skirts his exception from metal.
But, naturally,
always just doing his job.
[JM]
LII
And we’ll get up when we feel
like it, even though mama all luminosity
rouses us with melodious
and charming maternal anger.
We’ll laugh in secret about this,
biting the edge of the warm vicuña
quilts—and don’t do that to me!
Fumes from thatched huts—ah bunch
of scamps!—rising early to play
with bluish, bluing kites,
and, copping grinders and stones, they’d
pungently incite us with cow dung,
to draw us out
into the baby air that doesn’t know its letters yet,
to struggle over the strings.
Another time you’ll want to pasture
between your omphaloid hollows
avid caverns,
ninth months,
my drop curtains.
Or you’ll want to accompany the elders
to unplug the tap of a dusk,
so that all the water slipping away by night
surges during the day.
And you arrive dying of laughter,
and at the musical lunch,
popped roasted corn, flour with lard,
with lard,
you tease the decubital peasant
who today once again forgets to say buenos días,
those días of his, buenos with the b of barrens,
that keep backfiring for the poor guy
through the dentilabial
v that holds vigil in him.
[CE]
LV
Samain would say40 the air is calm and of a contained sadness.
Vallejo says today Death is soldering each limit to each strand of lost hair, from the bucket of a frontal, where there is seaweed, lemon balm that sings of divine seedbeds on the alert, and antiseptic verses with no master.
Wednesday, with dethroned fingernails peels back its own nails of camphor, and instills through dusty sieves, echoes, turned pages, incrustations,
the buzzings of flies
when there is corpse, and clear spongy suffering and some hope.
A sickman reads La Prensa,41 as if at a lectern.
Another is laid out palpitating, longirostrine,
about to be buried.
And I notice a shoulder is still in place
and almost stays ready behind this one, the other side.
The afternoon has now passed sixteen times through the
empatrolled42 subsoil,
and is almost absent
in the yellow wood number
on the bed that’s been unoccupied for so long
over there . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
in front.
[CE]
LVI
Every day I wake blindly
to work so as to live; and I eat breakfast,
not tasting a bit of it, every morning.
Not knowing if I have achieved, or even more, never,
something that explodes with flavor
or is merely the heart and that returned now, will lament
to what extent this is the least.
A child could grow up bloated with happiness
oh dawns,
before the grief of parents unable to avoid
wrenching us from their dreams of love into this world;
before those who, like God, from so much love
understood themselves even as creators
and loved us even to doing us harm.
Fringes of a invisible weft,
teeth that ferret from neuter emotion,
pillars
free of base and crown,
in the great mouth that has lost speech.
Match after match in the blackness,
tear after tear in clouds of dust.
[CE]
LVII
The highest points craterized, the points
of love, of capital being, I drink, I fast, I ab-
sorb heroin for