From Mouth of Hell
From Mouth of Hell
What in the world is most mine? What form takes root at the root of what I lack? What ruckus of swords like lesser music, ironic and failed? In this two-penny orgy, the actors change but not the torment, not the arcane museum of love and death. Capable of anything, the nothing within me.
*
Cornered by the public body, private hustling, bored ordeals, men cling to resentment. What better creed to quench their fury with pain? In no consortium with mourning, they skim across their busy days aimlessly. Nobody says: I beg you, embrace me. No one expects a woman to explain, should he ever reach her, life’s irrecoverable prose. Lack is a gleaming everything.
*
And I—to what market could I take that pearl of matchless brilliance? Like a traitor astute in red letters, sprinkling her body with pyramids, coating it dearly with kisses descending always deeper, toward the stars?
*
She resembles, among her cats, a sibyl. In the City of the Lily, also called the Red City. Metal engirdling her in shrill luster. And shy cunning, to disguise her proclivity for evil. Like a wall, dead to caresses, and neither malleable nor decorated, in the perplexed anxiety expressed by her body. Femininity in her fruit-bearing mouth. Aggressive fragility. Delicious, too.
*
As if deriving force from force, something says, suddenly, that to live is to lose. And at that, the light shines differently on where we stand as poverty addicted to the material. We might gather from this: a little turbulence, what came but didn’t, the open grammar of the heart. You must embrace, relentlessly, this awful news. Celebrate the shipwreck, that white oasis blinding us with blunt clarity.
*
It might happen, too, that the body is happy, that men allow it to be. They’ll enter, then, a sumptuous garden and praise its white grass, strange and wondrous. Such consolations never last. Pedantic birds fall through the cypresses, their wings dulled by lead in the sky. No other event worth noting. No other debt contracted by name, but flesh still reeks of wine and vainglory, like a futile mask, utterly trembling.
[Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero]