I

Now I see from afar those bodies

all passing, as if spurned by the light of cruel

spring: vital, tense, like metal

mesh, today is destitute of volumes: it opens

and closes, never dilating, stiff, mineral, all dust

and dry copper on the fingers, without sounds, without images,

suspended time of the future.

                           I saw them formerly,

and being sacred, they were one to me, or failed

to take on bodily forms: intangible

as fancies, inventions

or fears of desire: we may meet

beneath a sky of black branches, atremble,

parched slivers of of mica and slate,

this light of loam, of stagnant water, a being

of lichen and ivy, vegetal and putrid,

an emanation from the rarefied space

where the tree lives the cycles of power, time

of kindling and time corroded, when covert, luxuriant,

the fungus pours forth its greenish gold,

body of damp grass, gleaming ring, unmoved,

copper coin in the dead well that remains

a mesmeric corpse of lighting.

                                    Thus, parched,

the inverse of day vibrates, refracting these bodies,

and this sky as nude as a stalk of water

and this crystalline clarity of snow

know the voices of the grub and the grass of the snail and the sermon of the toad and the beetle that lives from excreta and languishment of hyacinth and opal.

What does desire know of this? Everything, perhaps,

obscurely, as when, on the luminous

planet of skin, it calls haltingly

the seclusions of an armpit by name, the sour

and sumptuous fire of the black pomegranate, floral juices of the pubis

and sand of the vegetal and bosky belly.

Haltingly, it recognises this body is identical

to the kingdom of grass. It falls, like sulfur,

the yellow veil of this dreaded day. Parched,

the fissures of clouds trace signs in the sky, empty pond, cold silver misted over

with the breath of plants, drunken, sulfurous,

at the hour when bodies recollect a fate

that seizes them, image of tainted waters

and withered sand.

                              A glass goblet,

imperial, aquatic, refractant

movements, gestures, eyes, protracted,

yes, everything said in a low voice.

                              ‘Before, I used to sit

and watch them from the distance. I couldn’t bring my hand

to them without shattering their cohesion, their

material weight, as when we touch a reflection in water. They resembled

me and were not me. They

told me a story, one I might

I have some role in. And now

they dissolve.’

                     A sun

in liquefaction, sun of sunsets and mist,

half-frozen, flaying the living skin of night.

Sun of diviners wending their way with lamps lit

with spleen oil and oil of the blood of calves: lavender

and rosemary, devil’s snare or mole grass

that blinds us to witness a deeper sun, and the gnashing of teeth

and the gleam of the mole that gnaws at the sun in the depths of the eyes.

           The wheel

must bear away the terrace, too, the paths,

the folding chairs, the coloured awning,

the streets beneath the clarion downpour of that summer,

slipping past, and we laughed, the blue handle of an umbrella, and the eyelash

trembled like a soundless throb, and now hands meet

and eyes meet eyes.

                             This too

the wheel must bear away. I free words

resonant of sabots and wet wood.

II

The live vegetation of the trunk,

when the boy, with eyes like a seer, used to swim in the liquid clarities of the closet,

faces, grotesques, eyes making flickers,

beards gold and aqueous, oils

embalming a dry skeleton,

a body shriveled at the end the hallways,

the mask, burnt with acid, of fear,

the majesty of an igneous and fuliginous world, aquarium of red clouds going dark,

ever at the edge of collapsing into absence.

                                                                    And the wood,

which creaks secretly and shifts, hearkening

a sound of sabots, haughty touch of plumage and shimmers of eau de vie,

the wood, exiled to a country of cork,

lapped by waters, by leopards of sun,

nude and refulgent, burns in the storehouse in the port, prodded by candles,

statuary, leprous, with marble froth,

with frost of scintillant salt and sickly green.

Men of corroded and verdigris bronze

up the quay, with dark leathern visors, pale and vague

under the iron claw and the shadow of the outspread wings of the cranes.

Up the quay, in silence, with the glimmer of the hooks,

dusty, in a diafilm frame,

stationary, instant, beneath a light of magnesium,

brandishing rifles and harpoons.

                                                   The myths

of adolescent time, the knife of Theseus

that would do justice at last, partition

between today and the time that inaugurates another time.

The years of abjection, time of birds of prey and bloodhounds stalking Catalonia,

time of tusks, time of the serpent’s stutters and the stammering of the rapinous rattler,

time of the buffalo’s bellow, time of homage to the fatuous crab and the murderous hedgehog,

the years of our humiliation, the empire of the lash,

and the sudden mythic space, when, glimmering, we would see,

after men with beaks of black vultures and men with heads of spiders and men with heads of polecats and scorpions,

instated in a new time,

men with faces of men.

                                     This grisaille

of sirens, of smoke and barges,

of chimney stacks black and tainted with soot,

the wall of bricks, the empty street with swatches of tar,

the one thing visible

to the eyes of a face drawn in dust on blind glass.

Dust eyes, dust features, echoed

in a luster that erases the gaze

of this face in the glass, seeing my face, assaulted by the blue

and a maritime quiver of clouds.

III

The cadaverous circle of the family,

with sordid oily blotches, like a sprinkling of dandruff,

faces withered, eyes cold in bare sockets in the golden glow,

nails tinged with blue that feel

for smoke and turpentine, feel for the bedcovers, eyes fixed, keys tucked away,

eyes vacant and faces corroded by bleach,

the skin of the air is the skin of acidum salis,

the skin like blue tracing paper, dry paper, eyes decals,

one colour, and the rigid head, with the lacquer that creaks when it shifts

(two layers of pigment, brushed on, to highlight the eyes, and a single swatch of rouge

on the forehead).

                           Many nights

having dined, we had to wind them back up:

to begin, we grease the hinges and the pistons,

straightened a skewed head, knocked dust from their garments,

and the family set to work.

                                          A touch of red,

like tomato, on the cheeks, denoted

chastity; panting prattle gave shape to

the children’s obedience; and a hook

for a hand stood for conjugal love.

                                                       On the streets,

driving candy-painted cars, the wolf pack, in tailcoats,

hordes of people who live for the night,

vixens, wild dogs, the python, the bear

supping blood and eating viscera on the bartops in bars.

Hair parted, slicked back, eyes bruised in deep sockets,

a crescent of red under corneal blue,

the pupil burned down to absolute white,

white blazers, striped trousers – black, yellow, pearl grey – under Chinese lanterns,

with the feel and the crackle of paper, trimmed with scissors,

flapping their hands and their arms, with bolo ties and panama hats,

as I play the first notes of the ballad of nacre

on a barrel organ or a music box covered in cracks.

                                         Pearls, like an arcane

    pounding of ivory,

on the tie, and pearls on the somber copper of the body.

                                                            Mad priestess,

black tigress, fulminant flesh, radiant

coal and rubies, vegetal and carnivorous bonfire,

in a gasping of green vines,

with a dark and sour scent of saffron!

Priestess of velvet and iron,

spilling the algoid blackness of your belly

over my face submerged in the fierce white waves, petrified,

of your body’s twin columns, furnace of a nocturnal sun with black petals.

V

I associate rainfall with the dead. It comes slow,

with spikenards and tubers, with the chill of the lilies

and pasty clods of worked soil,

with the venation of leaves, with shadows,

with quail flight and owls’ cries.

Earthward, timeward, in the heart of the loam,

who knows of them? They wait, for such is the cycle

of fertility. The buried axe

shines with silver more alive, with mineral fire.

And this is the law. The rain rinses furrows

from wheels in the soil, from scores of carriages past,

from prints of men’s feet and horse’s hooves. A grey and liquid film,

stifled brilliance, as of dark and opaque steel

over the sodden soil. Don’t you hear those voices,

girls’ laughter at midday in August?

Don’t you see this red blouse? Like a root,

a hand still digs the damp soil, withered

fingers with crooked claws, arid, of sack paper

and skin. No, the rain doesn’t reach

this kingdom. It falls slow, comes

devoutly to greet the olive tree’s trunk

polishes the cuspidate grain of the stone,

tames the boggy waters of the lake,

enraged with smoke, floods the den

of the vixen, the rabbit’s warren, the nightingale’s nest.

But it fails to penetrate the saturated mud,

the mass of porous humility,

of patience, of light, to reach the darkest demesne,

land of rancor and dessication of the dead,

who go on outstretching their hostile hands, ferrous,

with festering teeth and erect sex, trembling,

mummified, and scrape the skin

with a fervor of nails and dust. Will they possess us

or do they merely demand to return?

Demand vexation and tremors and pain?

Do they demand uncertainty, perhaps,

for their days, to feel the tumult of desire,

the hammer blow of panic, the rage

for domination, the dread of defeat?

Do they dare to long to live again?

As the root lives, the tuber, the grass,

can these men not live again, too,

confided to fate? Will they not concede to the cycle

of fecund time and of the time of return to the earth?

For all the pain borne before,

for the fleeting ardor of all these bodies,

for the memories quickened by this shower of light

and this savor of newly damp earth,

for the quaking of air when the rain

has ceased not long ago, and a bird takes flight

in a limpid silence, and for the colour

of this bird, inconclusive in the blue, which warbles

when the sky has brightened, for the suffering

we recollect, for the loves from before,

and humiliated innocence,

and desires unconfessed,

for all this – will we never have a word?

The rain seeps into the straw lofts of the old plantations,

rots the wood, cuts channels through the tillage

and nurtures the narcissus. Ashen is its colour,

which on the windows is the colour of memory.

There is only one time. Time of man

and time of beast, time of plant

and time of stone, are one. The falcon

that sinks from the heights

knows its fate, like the stone in the depths of the cistern

seeing its fate in a flicker of water.

They see it of a sudden, it annuls

and clasps them, they attain splendor: attain

the fulguration of being. And thus they come

to be what they are. Faithful, silent,

like the sunburnt Kermes oak, they say yes,

they know it is yes, that this image

– glint of dead water, or abode of shadows

in the heart of the brush land at eventide –

is what they are, it beseeches them to die there,

and this death is a having lived,

not an interruption or deferment.

They say yes, with the sense that they need regret

nothing, await nothing, that nothing is shorn

for everything already was:

they ever lived in the time of the inland of shadows,

the time of dead water in the depths of the well.

When we pass, by night, by the rustle

of wind fanning the leaves of the poplars,

or gather resplendence in clusters

in the lambent glory of noon,

or close, halfway, the shutters – the sun

a hammer on the empty streets – and a body

breathes warm on us, redolent of lemons,

or when we see a yellow stone in the forest

or hear a crackle of water and branches,

do we know everything will be this single instant?

Do we hope for anything more? Amnesiac,

dispossessed, time’s mirror no more dazzles us,

its feldspar reflections no longer cloud our eyes.

I am my yesterday, and feel the immanence

of the future throb in each gladiola.

It doesn’t espy us behind each instant: it is each instant.

It does not sport the dark face of our unease,

nor must we ask it for pity. Did we not always have the sense

that we were bearing it? Desire,

you dark slave in the mask of a prince,

and passion, you princess pale and blind,

who laugh attired in the brilliance of lilies,

do you not sense that your hour is the instant?

We do not win, we do not lose. The dead

abide in the eternal nocturne of fog,

the instance that is all time: the time of desire

and passion, the time of memory

and the time of sleep. The vapor of the brume

and a smoke cloud as of green wood

point to the location of our dreams: far off,

like the lighting on a summer night.

VIII

With firm steps, thundering through plantations and forests,

the bogeyman comes up the road.

                                                      If you tell me

I didn’t live all these years, that time

is the glow of this white pile of bones,

this revel of white on the sand flats,

that I will have lived nothing, in a clarity

of diamond and glass, if you tell me that in the persistent

glow of the paralyzed twilight of fire

I am the same person who heard those steps

in the empty attic of that winter night,

if you tell me he is coming now, that already the nursemaid

is shutting the door, and I arrive from the garden

when a sooty cloud chars the sky

and we feel the coming rain, the drum blow

of thunder on the walls of the celestial cave,

and I sense how a darkness dangling in the air

– as if everything were smothered by a bindlecloth –

how the luster, strangled by a black bandana

and the puncheon of the rain in my eyes from before

tell me: those steps are approaching, like a shadow

I now see, the lilaceous eyes of a death

on legs, the bluish beard, the grating

laughter of the sparrowhawk, the trepidation

of paths and forests trod by talons

the glow of rotten teeth, the gallows,

the rope of the hanged man furrowing my throat,

and if I am the one who is now screaming,

if now I see the reddish tongue,

the frozen rictus and the hanged man’s empty eyes,

if now, in the windows of the kitchen, darkened

by a stormy sky, I see his talons dancing

like a doll, those talons now wending their way,

pounding through the forest as he shoulders his sack

because I did not live all those years: the door swings

open, and the sky on the tiles

leaves a gleam of incandescent bronze, and taut,

the air feels in the garden’s foliage that apprehension

that I feel, a pounding in my chest, because he is here,

he is walking in the attic, he steps through the storm door

and now calls at the door with his iron hand,

in my chest, an iron hand grasps me,

at the open door of my chest, like the sky

stifled by the light of the tempestuous wind,

turbid with leaves intermingled with mud,

a dark wind in the pond, black with glimmers

under the dread of the sky in my open eyes,

and if you tell me that this is all that I’ve lived,

the moment of fear, a voyage through closed rooms

with weighty locks, hiding my face,

with wheezes, under the cushion, my heart

pounding to the rhythm of the steps in the attic,

resounding on the dark path of birds and pine brakes,

deafening, through the walls of the old plantations,

and the breadth of a step is the breadth of thunder,

and if you tell me I am he, holed up

in the bedroom, afraid of the basins

and the instruments of night, the sign of the cross,

the char of sparks at nightfall,

the fear of the lizards when lightning pursues them,

and if you tell me I’ve lived nothing, because I am bound,

hanging head-down, to the darkness of beams,

and if you tell me the moment of nocturnal fears,

the moment of waiting for the pitchforks to wound,

the moment of waiting till they thrash me like wheat,

hunched under the hoarfrost of shadows and sheets,

if you tell me all that is the time I am living, because I wake

and those deafening steps advance in the silence

and the house is the nocturnal house of panic,

manse of winter and rust, of windstorms

open to the sanguineous light of the paths,

and these steps are mine, and I walk through the forest,

clutching the rope draped around my bruised neck,

and I extinguish the darkness with my steps,

and I guard the darkness in my badly darned sack,

and when the rain comes, I will see the face

that awaits me, white and earthen, my face

in this bed where I lie, where I open my eyes in the morning

and live in a crepuscule of the mind, a livid light

of hanged men, where the bogeyman stalks, a man

with my face, with a landscape in his eyes,

a landscape of forests, of vacant plantations,

all the fear in the world lived in an instant,

the anguish of those rainy afternoons bearing down on my chest,

the anguish of breathless light, the wind

that rends my chest, and with my nails I scratch

the sheets, expecting the face of a dead man,

a yellow unreal, because all too real,

the intensity of inner time that I live,

and if you tell me words that do not sound, opaque,

and if he buries our face in a black bag, a dark

scrap of sackcloth, coarse on the skin,

and the words sound like a babbling of blisters,

like bubbles of mud burst and abandoned,

now I listen, and I know that I rise, and, in the darkness,

I still hear those steps, I live in that night.

X

The hollow of being. Ever the same

words, with the clang of false metal

or straw fires, with the feigned luster

of trinkets, white and spectral,

as though, once more, the scene filmed before

were repeated, these gaslit

streets, a postcard of London

at night, an enigma, all of it,

like your belly, the black roots

of the mons veneris, cavern of lighting

leaving a savor of sulfur on our lips,

fish of flame in a night of foam.

We will meet each other in the hollow of being,

the fundament of the world of matter,

an absolute space, the fathoms

of the tenebres, when the optic nerve

knows no silence, the blue of vibrations.

The sparkling night burns our eyes.

With the cinders fall the images of time.

This world without brilliance, without touch, trembles not,

matte air and dust from charcoal.

A dark paper blows through the mineral space.

Not the wind nor the words nor the light

in this hollow, not the darkness: the absence

of sensory data, as if the roof

were thrown open to the cold, and space to space.

Space devours space and collapses it:

the hollow of being opens to vacancy.

Pure exhalation, exhaling space

that cleanses the senses, the nude grotto,

the fathomage of exhalation.

We speak the hollow, speak the vacant place of being.

A whitish water, swallowed by smoke.

We will return to the night, to the smudged postcard

with leaden colours of a livid dawn,

to the swatches of sun, cold in a deaf clarity

to the waters of the river, the bridges of darkness,

the bell of molten light of autumn,

these streets lived before, in a vaporous

scene, like a double of our lived time,

and we will see again that green glove of silk

on the gold of the door of the dead carriage,

the pearls in the turban of the goddess

the polished glimmers of the night at the hotels.

It is a lithograph

on paper that crumbles, slow

like leaves descending in a dream.

There is no transition: we open our eyes

in the dark in the bedroom. The wings

of birds beat in the blackness. Is it now

that we’ve begun to dream? The visible world grows,

intuited in the light of imaginary time.

Like panting in a darkened room,

living in the space of the hollow of being, living

left nothing but a throb, with a momentary sun

in the pupil’s depth, a blind sun that doesn’t burn,

a sphere of ice in the bedroom.

Listening to the nothingness, inhaling an absence

of air in a caisson, in a barometric

zero, the hibernal void,

in non-time and non-space, the void

that tears at my lungs when I breathe

until I feel breathed in by the void,

the non-space that respires me, the formidable

lungs, and I am the breathing,

the breath of non-space, when it inhales

and exhales, when it blows me into an enclosure,

here, in the dark bedroom, in the convex sky

that flees the light, and I feel the lungs

of the night inhale me in a bedroom,

I feel the pounding, I am the pounding, the sky

that pounds, the light that has held its breath,

to leave a luminosity stripped of space,

to strip space of luminosity,

to see the depths of the hollow of being,

to see space without brightness or darkness,

to see space where there is no space,

to see the space that is all space.