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Exodus
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Beatus ille
(Horace)
I am he
Who as an old man rode
On the thickness of the night in the hills
Lighting caverns with torches of love
Bearing in the extremes of ungreying grief
Blue mercury lamps
Like newly pregnant milk in the hearts
Of the younger women who along with me peopled
The countryside and the cities established
When the early morning strings of the guitar
Were imprisoned by detonations recumbent
To camps by the bay
Like a child to its mother when she is sick
And it no longer cries but whimpers solitary
Not yet understanding the warmth of its small body
Balanced next to her breast.
I am he
Who told of the epic of April
Among missionary regions where the damp of the cypress
Became the tears of the dawn
Falling on the petals of the most beautiful of birds
The damaged leaves slashed by the ink
And the charcoal and their mountain perfum
Where battle was waged remorselessly
Raising brightly colored scourged flags
And on the tip of the heart
An exciting diamond like a virgin lip
Wounded by arrogance and desire.
I am he
The pilgrim who descend down to the elixir of the plains
Steeped in the aroma of coffee
Scattering the gunpowder-obedient-narcotic
Along the paths and swamps accustomed to the fecundity
Of the shade and to the full eclipse of silence submerged
Who taught the rain to fall early over the tall eucalyptus
And the pines high like our brow
Filled with hymns interrupting night watch (?)
In the explosions of the most battered months like October.
I am he
Triangular iron on the corpulent geometry
Of these dangerous years that sing sadness (?)
Along with the death of the sun in procession
To the innermost core with the saltspray flowers
Of this turbulent sea of almost faceless things (!)
Who harboured hundreds of ants blazing exile
In the inevitable storm of enervated acids
Of abortive crops like the nameless birth of larvae
On the shell of a dragonfly of lightening hesitant
To beget a squall or even a fire in the vaults of old age
Sweet sentence of sand in the canefields.
I am he
The tireless fisherman of algae and corals and green lilies
In the high latitudes of oceans and rivers and valleys
Washed by the blood of the most tremulous almonds
Who emigrated uprooted to unknown lands
Yet to be brought under plough and founded
The Seventh City on the Seventh Day of the Seventh Disobedience.
I am he
Divine trouble of a dismembered maternity
I now sing the misfortunes of a turbid perturbed future.
The eucalyptus will have to fight for a line broken
Through jungles detached from white thrones
Crowned by lovely statues to the immense black abyss of stones
That fall like beasts from the high.
All will be left littered with bones corroded
By the salt of fine lips unable to curb their rebellion
In time
Emphatic and caught unawares amidst the eyes
Galloping on nuclear thunder
On deformed coagulated red beer
On the sands of the beaches of this world
And no other.
The hands of all clocks will leap forward by millennia
Disloyal to their time
Campanas of lips that caressed my falling hair
Campanas of lips that caressed your falling hair
Campanas of lips that caressed our falling hair.
All will have been left corroded and reduced
By the equations of fire and raw salt
The destruction of hope
The destruction of morale
The destruction of the forbidden and false meddling
The destruction of vessels with offerings and libations
In the chapters
The destruction of vessels with offerings and libations
In convents
Where sick white doves slept stained
And murdered pure purple.
Somnambulant from nights of insomnia
Five burning continents will be turned
Into wrinkled radioactive shrews
Prematurely aged and caught unawares by the ignorance of others
Lost in the early morning sap of resin
Fondled in satiated mature pleasure sadly of ages eternal.
The delirium will have to be seen of all the young women
Who wasted their time begetting runts
With testicles wicked runts with testicle
Horrible runts with testicles useless for multiplication
There will be no recognizing the butterflies should the pose
On the perfumed recollection of all the jasmine
Of all the Aprils mourning the disobedience
Among men
There will be no time to meditate on anything absolutely anything
Nor to understand that we were mammals divided into pure races
There will be no time to meditate on anything
Absolutely anything
Nor to apprehend that we were mammals divided into pure races
Or immense uniformed armies like rays anger-sublime
From the tearful eyes of a mother
It will be too late to be able to understand and apprehend.
Our races will gradually break free through long paths
Our races will gradually break free through familiar swamps
Our races will gradually break free through cracked mirrors
Crucified by splinters in the depths of memory
There where the word is traced naked and sexless and gives the order
There where the word is traced wrinkled and thirstless
There where all will be futile
All will be completely futile
I promise you.
Those struggles of corrupt principles
Those struggles of exclusive principles
Those separations of the flesh and the spirit and the skin
Those separations
Spirit-flesh-fat-book-guitar-vegetable pitch
Those separations of the body and the violence on my hands
Those separations of the body and the violence of your hands
Those separations of the body and the violence
Of our repented hands
Those separations
Take heed are we to be concerned now with
Impossible Salvation
Here beside the grief ingrained in the stone columns
As the obelisk of detonations of infamous bacteria
Take the heed here and now at this precise moment of circumferences
Those separations.
But will shall pray in shame buying psalms in series
We shall pray constantly together and to the good Lord
We shall pray constantly together and without races
To the good white and black and mulatto lords of all jungles
We shall pray
I promise you
We shall pray in the name of all the fathers and all the mothers
White and black and mulatto of all creeds
We shall pray in the name of all the sons and all the daughters
(missing line)
White and black and mulatto of all creeds
And one word
Will give us the long-awaited blessing of centuries of rotten vintage
Amen.
All will have been lost despite all
All will have been lost (missing words)
And my hand and your hand and our hands
(missing line)
Begging a lie will point to the centre
Of what was a Summer Swarm
In a transparent sign of vertigo before the birth of the repetition
Or the advent of agonizing ashes
There where one day the waters began to sweat from my back
There where one day the waters began to spring forth weeping sweating
From our backs blistered from such exorcism.
( seven lines missing)
I have grown accustomed to the female symphony from the sea
He has accustomed us to the splintering of empty vessels
He has accustomed us to the pealing of the immense promise
To the constant call of Mass
To carve on our souls underlying
Our sins conceived in the name of a plaster statue
And a crown of broken thorns on thin ribs.
We have grown accustomed which is why we no longer believe
In the morning communion or the word of winds imprisoned
And they will go up in flames all the apostles
Who reconciled sleep with a glass of fresh clear water
Warmed by the collision of summer
Warmed by the collision of winter
Crucified icons will go up in flames
In their black-good-Friday veil
Selling the words of the Man in baskets of laurel
Selling me
Selling you
Selling us in baskets of laurel
Repented all the sons of the Supreme Lord
He will come to Us to confess his incapacity
To rule the word
And the Kingdom of this World
And no other.
Repented we need not fear the involuntary look
Of the dethroned
Take heed here and now before the mask of arrogance
Covers the sun the moon forever
Let us take heed are we to be concerned now with Impossible Salvation
(missing line)
Let us heed well if we are really concerned
Let us take heed.
It will have to be then
When the eucalyptus will not have to fight for a line broken
Through jungles already detached from white thrones
Crowned by lovely statues to the immense black abyss of stones
That fall like beasts from on high
They have been left incarcerated and belied among the prayers (?)
And the incense on the pyre of honor for all the beings
That one day peopled this world
And no other
On the pyre oh honor for all the beings
That one day begat this consumed world
And no other.
And all will have been left thus
In the shadows of the great secret cemeteries
Without anguish
Drinking our own bile scattered at whim
In the ruptured amphoras of Maternity
There will not be a single lament
I promise you
Only
A chorus of confessions and their worn hymn
On the resin of eucalyptus bloodied by white plumes
Weightless in lament
Only that
I promise you.
And the last day began to break
Quickening the collective release
From his temple we have precipitated a dusk of candelabras
On the angry Earth
Cast there
That hastens o break the heart of our ballad (check !)
That totters and falls over the shoulder.
We have mistreated language and the word inverted
And the non-communication inherited from the hosts
Of old endures in us
Without consulting in the night we have drained
The sad long arms of the sun and the winter
Of mornings brought to a close
We have penetrated not knowing where and trapped the flavor
Of great temperatures and the black liquid
That bitter liquid of foods profaned
By the voice of the embryo
We have burnt our beards
That earlier concealed our intoxicated looks (!)
We have construed the secret of our suffering image
Without learning that the verb conjugates in the first identity
We have lied before the sacred hour
Of offering our daily comedy to absent times
We have lied in recession enervating sufficient heat
That gladiator shields must hide
Our geometrically devoured body. (check)
There were shrunken masks at the Sanctuary door
After
A night of fables and in the West of castrated seas
White flags will be raised over the pilaster
Of the males of office
Trumpets will be spent and forged in the heat
And a legion of steeds advance from the North on our strangulated hope
Betrayed on the other shore of flaming trusting reason
But the bayonets will calm the wound while they parch
As the day breaks and from the South can be heard hymns
That will sing to their black heads of hair and armour plate
Epics will very early announce the sterile shaft
And the sign already covers the shroud under which
In the perfumed lands of the East was shed
The skin
That must be livid in mourning the finite.
What is left to us my son
How much calm consumes us all
So much intransigence
How much light abandoned in slender cathedrals
So much contamination
How much spray lost in the suburbs
So much misery
How much orphaned maternity in the human jungles
So much music
How much sorrow that painfully wanders away
So much fighting
How much skin twisted on the crosses of memory
So much immensity
How much love falls and is cradled dying and twisted
What is left to us my son.
The voice of the mother let itself be hurt there
Under the burial of our ruined promise
Hanging in perennial unending
The sign rose piercing the anteroom of winter
The weightlessness of the clime let itself be steeled in
Bulky equations
It was then when on the margins of a date (check trans. try edges)
The statue of the immortals
The human disorder of secrets
Islands dressed for the communion of the Advent of Truth
Erupted on all nations bearing the burden of this committed world
And no other.
There is something that bleeds without omitting its continuation
And approaches
Mercy on all that is done
I seek shelter in the bosom of virtue spoilt (check)
After
There remains so little to enumerate
The very scourge of ample genital emanations
The beauteous scorpion that sluggishly
Stirs beneath our scales
The solitude wherein the wisdom
Of centuries dissolves
The escape
The Constitution for those who leave
Inflamed
For Paradise
The dethroned old of centuries to come
Heavy bars magnetized to the poles
Heavy adolescent desire
Sheets torn from such infidelity
Puberty that bleeds in midnight confidence
There remains so little to enumerate
And I shelter not.
May death's day come to me in sincerity
Without fear of hurting you
Beyond all this day-to-day urgence.
Each is a mask I do not deserve
A habit of false communion not to be understood
A bird that will revive me with salt (change for revived)
The desperation of not being able to teach
How to live without war
A mushroom forced in the culmination of verbal oxide
Naked lace in a translucent suite
With an illusion made for two
That handwoven falls
Crazed before the requiem for the unacceptable
Each spreads in the borrowed glint
Of invisible daggers encrusted in legends
That flee to the motley wounds to dialogue
And we are hit by disputed hegemony
Of brandishing on the platform of the world
That irrevocable title of a male sex
Each comes in muslin
Sealing the womb with the nurture of immense
Pain in genesis
That takes like a militant song to its non-physical beauty
Dispelling the calm of language the mystical permanence
The silhouette accustomed to its form
The slowness of armed delight the temptation to lie first
A destruction a false armistice
It is then understood
How decadence has been profaned with razors
How incorrigible universal judges courageously
Decline the future as they please
How verse never rules its hungry
Domain
How the ashes are involuntary chalked
How the faithful fossil-less dust spreads
Over all those who let themselves be defeated
Without poetry.
One in agony dared to say that
Only they
Those of the morrow
Would inherit the pestilence of today.
As of now
My forehead soaked in live oils
Will hastily raise
In one fell swoop
The elect foods to nurture dissolved wombs (change for selected)
On the Seventh Day of the Seventh Disobedience
The Seventh City will rise among the multitude that observes
And dies.
There is in my permanence a dry permanently quiet crackling
Like a piece of hollow intensity
Like wasted food
Like a black bird watching over my invariable sleep
I slumber
And in your pale loyalty
Recognizing its violence
I cover my trembling skin like nocturnal retina forbidden death
Like the beating of bread that wanes excommunicate
There are in me
Hungry unexplored funerals.
I decipher the small slumber of a child on the Seventh Morn
That opened to the city its cloak of honey orchids limes
Encased fragrance
Unmeasured silence
I decipher the small cry of an arrogant trade
And search whence we came into being
I examine and conquer the wealth of sleep
Swaddled in arms I search and we conquer
The indefatigable sweat of the silence that makes men
I return defeated to a useless quest
To adopt something vulgar to sustain a nervous
Rhetorical day of old bombastic forms
Like flesh heaped
Unsuspected new moons
That have not found how to alleviate the lingering cry
Of memory exploded by hand
Ill-begotten ash
Ice traced with strings of this guitar sadness
Foregoing a long exile
There is a demented echo in the crucified eyes of the banished
Growing in absence like a sleepless bark
Emerging between phagocytic fabric on one of those
Unconquered streets in the neighborhood of the universe.
Your unsalvageable distance demanded unnecessary trades
You shed the months in blood
You burst the bounds of terrible monstrous
Insomnia of oscillating breasts and the depths of vigil
Begat the silent grey ashes of a creature
Barely damp
A vibrant deep sounding pain
And the city is hemmed in its daily sorrow.
But I proclaim to you a symbol will forth amidst the ruins.
There were countries in the city
Where the lights on rainy nights frequented the ports
And the rough noble waves rapidly scaled your naked body
That my sweat of thine.
An able wind that bound my temples
Slept silently by me
The kilometers merged incoherent stray
Tremulous
And a presaged litany charred us dismembering bones
Oppressed
The throat the soul stolen by war angels
There came moments of eternal plaintive shouts
But nothing was heeded
Only the tremulous stray kilometers merged
Silent
They were the first premonition of the night before
Like inner invasions
Like a firm sentence
Like a swarm of small guerrilla insects
Submerged in the flesh
They were the first premonition of the night before
That pointed to the venomous lands
Like the epilepsy of an almost necessary slag broth
Like a last impulse to reaffirm
The most grotesque in the silence.
The false hosts slept at last
The prayers kept their promise of assuaging fears (las oraciones?)
Only the fears of our tumefact souls
All was sick all was sick all was sick all
The most valuable objects
Larvae of stagnant water velvet flowers
Stones like the smile of the men doves
And crutches clutched moons and suns in the play of the sexes
Innocent faces of the zodiac formed long shadowy lines
Dancing on the sacrificial skin
To the rhythm of precious vertiginous blessing.
The sentence was not passed
The butterflies flew incinerated
Riders mounted the silence the solitude
Antiquity of disordered years
Amphoras of wines for the forbidden feast
Quiet were the resonant melodies dressed in Sunday chant.
Your trace slept a terrible dream by me
Fragrances of old were repeated for days and days
Campanas of old rang out for days an days
All the dreams of old shone for days and days
Quiet now and sleep
Then you will sleep by me
Your charm perfumed in secrets and fever cities
Will arise
From the ashes rose dresses will hang
From the cemeteries
There is in me a silence of quenched charcoal.
Praised be the body of old age
Which is so wise
The far-off word
The name
Teaches new doctrines prayers new songs
And routed victories.
Quiet now
All afternoons will seem like spring violated (raped ?)
The tall buildings of the world will fly enormous flags
The colors of the iris
Silence the speed of the noise and the city
Will mask the everlasting hymns
And the world will regain confidence wrested.
Nothing is to understood while there is no pure presence.
Quiet now
Quiet distrustful of the city foreboding.
On the streets winter sweat will collect expectant
An omen of people who are quiet and rest
On Monday too
My permanence already clamors for a long pained sleep of sharp.
Quiet now
Old age is so wise
Quiet and sleep
Listen to the wisdom of silence
Changing its perishable fragrance
Silence
Silence the silence returns to its initial bloom
Quiet
Quiet and sleep
With rest surprised in its slumber
Now the temperature is high cultivating
Conquered greens
Of the cloudless days of the new years
That will again beget silence eternal
Quiet now
Quiet and sleep
The last days of silence are here.
I felt the days that passed sensitive untouchable
I felt the heat break innumerable humankind
Weakening the cult of sex its private multitude
I felt several times your naked body on my body
On my naked tears
Expiating me
Expiating you
Expiating us
I felt your name transfigured
Beaten
Dilated
Elevated
In all my permanence
I felt it I felt it
Quiet now
Quiet and sleep by me always.
A transparent bird will fly from the sea
To the obelisk
(missing three lines)
There will also be a firmness in the crop of early images
The harvest of the fruit will yield fine oranges from the milk.
The night reclaims what was snatched headlong
A son.
There was once a bridge of bricks of candy
A son slept under the sun's fronds his body
Beauteous in your likeness dressed in fern
The rains burst into silence and the crashes
Disturbed his slumber and the night and the years
Died of old age.
The night reclaims what was snatched headlong
A son.
Already in me the life of the silence is hushed
I hear from afar the wisdom of silence
Subterranean metamorphosis
Silence
All has been no more than that
Silence
All has been no more than the flight of a broken eclipse.
Quiet
I am already asleep
Sleep
Sleep silent sleep
I am already quiet.
© Pedro Perez Sarduy
From SURREALIDAD, Union, Havana, 1967
Translated from the Spanish by Jean Stubbs
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