stargazer's poetry

only death
There are lone cemeteries,
tombs filled with soundless bones,
the heart passing through a tunnel
dark, dark, dark;
like a shipwreck we die inward,
like smothering in our hearts,
like slowly falling from our skin down to our soul.

There are corpses,
there are feet of sticky, cold gravestone,
there is death in the bones,
like a pure sound,
like a bark without a dog,
coming from certain bells, from certain tombs,
growing in the dampness like teardrops or raindrops.

I see alone, at times,
coffins with sails
weighing anchor with pale corpses, with dead-tressed women,
with bakers white of angels,
with pensive girls married to notaries,
coffins going up the vertical river of the dead,
the dark purple river,
upstream, with the sails swollen by the sound
of death,
swollen by the silent sound of death.

To resonance comes death
like a shoe without a foot, like a suit without a man,
she comes to knock with a stoneless and fingerless ring,
she comes to shout without mouth, without tongue,
without throat.
Yet her steps sound
and her dress sounds, silent, like a tree.

I know little, I am not well acquainted, I can scarcely see,
but I think that her song has the color of moist violets,
of violets accustomed to the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the gaze of death is green,
with the sharp dampness of a violet leaf
and its dark color of exasperated winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
she licks the ground, looking for corpses,
death is in the broom,
it is death's tongue looking for dead bodies,
it is death's needle looking for thread.

Death is in the folding cots:
in the slow mattresses, in the black blankets
she lives stretched out, and she suddenly blows:
she blows a dark sound that swells the sheets,
and there are beds sailing to a port
where she is waiting, dressed as an admiral.

tr. by Donald S. Walsh

:::next:::

ordinance of wine
When to regions, when to sacrifice
deep purple stains fall like rains,
wine opens the doors, amazed,
and into the shelter of the months flies
its body of soaked red wings.

Its feet touch the walls and the tiles
with the dampness of drowned tongues,
and upon the edge of the naked day
its bees go falling in drops.

I know that wine does not flee shouting
at the coming of winter,
or hide in gloomy churches
to seek fire in crumbled rags,
rather it flies above the season,
above the winter that has now arrived
with a dagger between its hard eyebrows.

I see vague dreams,
I recognize far away,
and I see in front of me, behind the windowpanes,
meetings of unhappy clothes.

They are not reached by the wine bullet,
its effective poppy, its red ray
die smothered in sad textures,
and it spills along lone canals,
along moist streets, along nameless rivers,
the bitterly submerged wine,
the blind and subterranean and solitary wine.

I stand in its foam and its roots,
I weep on its foliage and its dead,
accompanied by tailors fallen
in the midst of the dishonored winter,
I climb ladders of moisture and blood
groping along the walls,
and in anguish of the coming time
I kneel upon a stone and weep.

And toward acrid tunnels I make my way
dressed in transitory metals,
toward solitary wine vaults, toward dreams,
toward green palpitating shoe polish,
toward disinterested tools,
toward tastes of mud and throat,
toward imperishable butterflies.

Then the wine men rise up
wearing deep purple belts
and hats of defeated bees,
and they bring goblets filled with dead eyes,
and terrible swords of brine,
and with raucous horns they greet one another
singing songs of nuptial intent.

I like the raucous songs of the wine men,
and the noise of the wet coins on the table,
and the smell of shoes and grapes,
and of green vomit:
I like the blind singing of the men,
and that sound of salt striking
the walls of the dying dawn.

I speak of things that exist. Heaven forbid
that I should invent things when I am singing!
I speak of spit spilt upon the walls,
I speak of slow whore stockings,
I speak of the chorus of wine men
striking the coffin with a bird bone.

I am in the midst of that singing, in the midst
of the winter that rolls through the streets,
I am in the midst of the drinkers,
with my eyes opened toward forgotten places,
either remembering in delirious mourning,
or sleeping tumbled into the ashes.

Remembering nights, ships, seed times,
departed friends, circumstances,
bitter hospitals and girls ajar:
remembering a wave slapping a certain rock
with an adornment of flour and foam,
and the life that one leads in certain countries,
on certain solitary coasts,
a sound of stars in the palm trees,
a heartbeat on the windowpanes,
a train crossing darkly on cursed wheels
and many sad things of this sort.

To the moisture of the wine, in the mornings,
on the walls often bitten by the winter days
that fall in wine cellars no doubt solitary,
to that virtue of the wine come struggles,
and tired metals and deaf dentures,
and there is a tumult of broken objections,
there is a furious weeping of bottles,
and a crime, like a fallen whip.

The wine digs in its black thorns,
and it walks its lugubrious hedgehogs,
amid daggers, amid midnights,
amid cigars and twisted hair,
and like a sea wave it swells its voice
howling tears and corpse hands.

And then flows the persecuted wine
and its tenacious wine bags are smashed
against the horseshoes, and the wine goes in silence,
and its casks, in wounded ships where the air bites
faces, crews of silence,
and the wine flees along highways,
past churches, among the coals,
and its amaranthine feathers fall,
and its mouth is disguised in brimstone,
and the wine burning among worn-out streets
seeking wells, tunnels, ants,
mouths of sad dead men,
through which to reach the blue of the land
in which are mingled rain and absent ones.

tr. by Donald S. Walsh

:::back:::

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