by Jorge Aulicino
English translation by Silvia Camerotto.
The original version in Spanish
was published by Ediciones del Dock:
Book I / Confutatis
A sudden feeling of dizziness and grandeur, in the street,
you must have tasted it, Wolfgang, have you?
All that breathing which comes out from inhabited bays,
warm daybreaks, sounds of the jungles and excavators.
Look at that man in a bar from an aloof distance.
He has understood amid a maelstrom of braking,
of sirens and rough engines’ chirps
that debts may be forgotten, and the painful awakening,
the withdrawal of the tide of things, the historical instant of the substance:
is eternal now; and he fears it.
Who would have known it? Just as each man carries his own secret cancer,
when the delirium of knowledge absorbs him, nobody gets onto.
Wolfgang, every now and then assailed by the vertigo, would
nevertheless have done lightening appeased by violins, an alibi.
The man in the bar has paid for his moment of being alone with the spirit.
I remember it: he always spoke about Rome. Particularly,
of a café called Pérgamo. He did not mention
anything about coffee. And he described without naming
a course of light towards some cups
which seemed abandoned on a table,
the coffee dregs in the bottom,
the bashed edge of one of those cups.
I am talking about another one. Another man, another café, the Puerta del Sol.
And I am talking about another Pérgamo, a museum in East Berlin,
with cities rebuilt in artificial rooms,
entirely sun resistant. A gaunted palace without windows.
Still we talk about similar things.
We talk about uomi chiusi. About figures inside which
the world opens like fruit. Figures.
Men in absent position.
There is another world in the worlds. This is what is talked about.
Which hand has apparently thrown this and everything else?
I mean the excavator tracks under the rain we
look at as we walk past a window.
Print the Requiem over them. I’m talking about this.
There is nothing which does not climb into violent lowland
when the spirit is in between things.
Dead things, those who were, those who seem
to have remained half done
—excavator tracks, the dregs of coffee—,
that which has been lived that could be said with a sovereign accent.
Without, Pérgamo, he said. Or Mozart.
Isn’t there an unclutched spirit too in between things?
Something of melancholy death. The weights, the meter,
the ridiculous crystals, the laments of the jars,
Eliot’s Lady, who listened to Chopin, so private.
Don’t you believe that the substance of things is the abandonment of a god?
The industrial trash, the big warehouses, the central
part of any city at night,
don’t they carry that bottom scrapes and mashed skull?
From sooted holes, from patience.
—A woman really loved him. Love was an impact
like the first lights, the distinctive noise, the plasma’s confusion.
(In the building complex, at night, under a compact fluorescent
lamp, taken by a strange passion to an Uruguayan whom
he never understood, he wrote everything he could on the rear side of the tickets,
in the front pages of diet books.
Exiled, in love with a shadow from a mayor exile,
he always had more to remain silent about than to speak about.
How can we name what we ignore? How can we name the strawberries,
the cat’s platter, the bad painting’s frame autonomy?
Violin and piano sonata on the outworn cassette.
The night dissolved the building complex’s blunt tower.
It’s different with a guitar,, the payador said. Something different
is something different. But it is with a guitar. And while
the sonata was playing he would allow himself to write down
the supermarket’s list, artificially
and basically profound: yerba, meat, mayonnaise.
To the pajonales, to the totorales, he wished to return to.
The lamp bulb was the last one to go out. Yellow picture, the window.
The face reflected against the fathomless pane.
He would not recognize them so. Not because they were
drowned in crude oil or the frivolous weekend houses were over them.
He would not recognize them because he never knew them. Because he never looked /at them.
And that’s why he loves them, and he writes some blurred paragraphs
about substance on the rear side of the tickets).
Dark red the nucleus, delicate the sound, of the final substance
of this man from Puerta del Sol bar evidences should reveal.
I’m not talking about the one from Pérgamo, but there are not such splinters
in the face of the man at the bar.
The muffled sound of a stone slab sinking.
Its complete closure makes him suspicious.
A perfect stranger. A genuine criminal.
Our measuring systems are debatable.
The brows, face muscles contractions,
the way he calls the waiter.
He could, in his whirlpool of nozzles, in his temporary unbalance,
call off the signs, a sky clouded by invisible clouds,
rain not seen, world sternly deprived of the spirit in it.
(We are now face-to-face. Without libraries or waste.
I came here to confront you, face-to-facet, said the man of the building complex.
But he had not in the least given up his counterbalance.
His past in the esteros. The astounding banks.
The inappropriate bellow in the afternoon which was always the last one.
And besides, the zeal, or whatever it was that coupled him to the Uruguayan.
The even more incomprehensible substance of her beauty creams).
To insist that a man holds the secret:
Which one is yours?
To insist that he is among us
living an unreachable vertigo.
This man of the bar Puerta del Sol is just a guy.
A figure in the infected afternoon.
Simply anonymous. That would be the trap.
In this case he would not understand it.
No nucleus no survey in his hollow depth.
The evil howl in your belly. Rests of the bad
digested fruit.
Only one and not everyone bit there.
Woman was made from one’s rib.
We have nothing to do here.
That is not here.
And what you put here will turn against you.
The substance not even god knows.
And this is for everything’s perfect silence.
(Ten years from now he pays the rent and writes.
What he writes about is the pus of a battle he fights alone.
The night x-rays say nothing to him..
He does not accept the battle. It’s the same one.
I’m going to leave, he said to himself. Like a protest that would open a crack.
He said it every night. And he wrote the surprising result on a ticket.
Another note about her breath and a tuna tin over the table.
It was —he verified —as if the entire philosophy surrounded him. The whole /bookcase.
Questions multiplied. The Kaiser. An army.
Millions of worn out soles in more or less elevated aims.
And the sonata would make him cry at last, over an unreliable fathomless list).
If Pérgamo or la Puerta are the same, how could we be alive?
The accurate man in the story
or the one who is only the figure of man.
An unbearable game in which the sea defies us
and throws us onto the beach like defeated topmasts.
An untenable pollution of disregarded proposals.
We would die of despicable frozen desperation.
We could tell nobody that what we ignore torments us.
What is that which Pérgamo ignores?
What is that which Puerta del Sol spitefully denies?
(To say it in one way or another, he ruminated. In no rate bills..
In confusing phrases. In her agitated smell translated
into a code nobody will understand. Like this said.
In living here, in the building complex.
In the abstract industrial buildings existence.
In the inexistence of totorales and bandurrias.
Anything where the seal has bounced.
It so is it said).
Even though it sounds like resignation, smell of tombs,
this is the edge of life.
Nothing growing out from bays without dreams.
Nothing seen in between by untimely giants.
Bulwarks in the Neuquén, dry ditches, petroleum wellsprings,
the poison that waters the seeds of future monsters.
All of this is your abc. And nothing is.
You always choose.
The document is written with everything you can.
And that lime dust which is left out
or centuries which are left out
do not exceed what your spirit enlightens.
(The Uruguayan sleeps over the knitted cover.
Bird bones, freckles on the breasts,
Not transferable snore.
I’m not leaving, he repeats in silence).
Book II/ Towards Evil
The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination. A capital
Negation destroyed him in his tenement
And, with him, many blue phenomena.
Wallace Stevens, Esthétique du Mal
… in a world that doesn’t clear up
and erases
from its limits what overflows by the heart.
Darío Rojo
Warner:
The only thing I see is a water dog;
it could be an optical illusion of you.
J.W.Goethe, Fausto
1.1
The weight of evil in every drop
of the leaves of the vines.
The grass, the Saturday, furrowed by the footprints
of the one who nominates as a spirit
sustainer of the trees, the dew.
But, it is not that this dew is contaminated
with soots, leftovers, combustion trash
that floats and descends with the calm water onto the grass,
but the area with plants
next to the railroads of a suburban train
it is, basically, the wound
and the sustaining spirit and nothing else
what keeps this mana, from which our evil nourishes,
opened.
Wherefrom would our roots nourish
if not from any pit of vegetation,
any honeycomb buzz in the summer or rain
that was not really in the plans,
categorical, absolute, the final blow
of the natural emptiness that constitutes
the day in which we sail in unconscious waters?
1.2
Those who caressed violently
over the table in the playground next to the River.
They had arrived on an old bike,
it was easy to mistake them for evil.
But they were not evil because of how they looked like
with those worn out jackets and their love for fuel
combustion and the deep noises of the machine.
If they travelled all over the province in motorbike,
anyone could have bet
that they had not been carried away
nor did they try to make it with the flight of the herons
by the side of the highway,
or with the life in the swamp,
or with the movement of the grass under the wind.
Similarly, neither the chemical streams
troubled or mortified them,
nor the trash in the wood,
nor the tyres alongside the streams.
Those insensible angels divided nature
by the pavement. They were perfectly balanced
sustaining themselves in their own speed
and in the life of their bodies.
And they did not speak with that which does not speak.
1.3
We have the cities, large scorpions,
or unexpected giant amibae in the pampa.
The black bird descends from the tree
and the boy in the park gets scared and is fascinated.
No doubt the bird spoke to him sometimes turning its head
towards the deepness of the park,
you could say it indicated from afar how much
of a wood the frond promised to be,
but also at that point a gloomy fable began
of boys and witches, crumbs and ogres (so is told).
There is no way out, don’t you see? Fear,
horror, ecstacy everywhere made their stund rattles
sound. We too were thrown from the curtains of good.
And now we are excluded by the Western galleries
that the capital raised as a deity without deus
and beyond him.
You shall not fornicate mother or father or agustian sister.
You shall give to Caesar.
But if you read the books, if you read all those books,
vague, fanciful, useless, in that cursed untidy room
without dedicating to work, if you read them
you have read the sole book and you will not understand.
The sum, the substraction, the division, the logarithms,
the forces of history considered as body
mechanics in time and before death
and all that may be deduced from this word,
have inclusion as a rule.
2.1
(I would like you to walk tonight into the room of the folding screens.
I coud give nothing to Caesar.
I could give nothing from this naked body to Caesar.
The whole body is to be taken by you tonight in the room
to its last inch of skin.
White extension, next to the window; you would leave
otherwise or there is nothing I would have from you if you left
without taking the whole body in between the folding screens).
2.2
So if evil is what causes damage or disruption,
what bleeds and escapes, what I cannot take
or understand and I misdeem.
So if evil is what does not contain me and what I do not contain ,
then the beauty, then beauty
is like the enchanted tree of evil, the son of life.
If men had not been destroyed herein,
and somehow at some point too something
of the entirely objective weave, then it would have it
like the pain of a lance,
a crusade for the personal skull,
for the bird that exceeds from the wood.,
the water between the hands, the sand
or the fetish that turns out from all this.
But, by God, they hit hard
in some zone outside ourselves.
And now we are the beach who disdains the book
because the scriptures failed at one point.
2.3
A simple argument, I believe:
something violated the law of calculation
for having expelled Satan and giving Caesar.
Everything was turned into forms and they left the desert,
the thistles, the taiga or the wood,
the silhouettes of the trees
and the cliffsides
abandoned to an impossible beatitude.
3.1
The old man grumbled,
his habits were insufferable.
Animated by a simple logic,
they would not be understood anyway.
Everything in the old man was impossible
because he himself had become a subject with no sentence.
Emerged from the market, he was not a sign that could be read.
And this question of urinating at the back, midst the plants
which he uselessly looked after all day long,
or the grumbling like a breath of the body,
forced his removal like the green,
the photos he shot — what for? — along
seventy eight years
and the wine jar that stirred up nothing in him.
Unlike leisure, the time of the old man,
between a ruined tree and the tomatoes,
the twilight of faith, the triumph
of a reason that feeds on itself.
3.2
Religion begets monsters.
Before needing what is proposed by good
we had to throw ourselves into huge deserts.
Lost, that’s how we would desire goodness.
But in this way the whole was torn into pieces.
The names and the endless flights,
the endless waves, the nuances,
the wood and the tree, the smell and the spiciness,
the blue or the slate, the raven and the varmint,
would not take communion among each other or with the fox.
The song of the snow, the armies,
everything was an irreparable loss.
Even locked in our homes or in the high holidays,
in the magnificent peak or in grief,
we could say something incomplete lied ahead.
3.3
The fool thrived, talking to the animal,
who was the fugitive, his power denied, the merit
of walking around without concern, of creating joy out of himself.
The score mistaken, the wit —so emerged—
was one-handed.
There was no exclusion: God had left.
So the last seeds belong to the dethroned
angel.
4.1
And the pain when I speak to you
and the pain when you’re not here:
the endless talk of the she lover,
this time, intercepted by the flight of the mud hens.
She remained silent by the window.
He emptied himself over the phone
it was an abysmal disappointment for him.
Why —she asked herself— should she feel such pull
as if it were an exhausted muscle?
The sight of the flock did not give her peace:
she suddenly felt she had ceased to feel.
In your ordinary life, in your rigorous ordinary life
there would be Tao (the potential set on its own).
There is no message in the flock, she said.
No promise or pain in the flock, she repeated.
The abyss moaned for the lover on the phone.
4.2
We talk too much with God.
Among too many disappointments,
among occupations,
in the colorless mornings,
we talk to God.
In the business discourse,
in the discourse of love,
we talk too much with God.
A boogie-woogie, a latin guitar,
a tomato sauce, speak with God.
5.1
The light of the sailboat reflected on the water amidst the islands.
All this predictable beauty, she repeated.
The strong drink, the light cigarette.
Have you seen the shantytown under the highway?
Here, when you reach the harbor, she asked.
All those people around had no answer.
They did not have a moral answer. And kept on smoking.
The cigarettes in the dark draw a circle.
It was not lifted up throughout the night.
The ritual was again fulfilled.
There were no stories or memories of women,
their bellies hold tight, the humidity between their legs.
Satan was left outside the circle: the women, the shantytowns.
5.2
However, this is the dry wind.
Looking at the dry wind every morning.
In company of the plants with no anxiety.
There where the wind strikes.
There is that about us which nothing is.
Where there is no thought. Where the branches
bend towards the wind.
6.1
And I shall make love a simple and curious
need.
So she said.
At the door of the hypermarket and while
she dealt with some packages,
facing the eight lined avenue
which slides naturally in between the low buildings,
everything held up by the sun web,
a perfect day, but unaware,
while she focused on the plastic
bags, cans, vegetables,
and nevertheless it was not focusing either, she said, without talking,
“love, a curious and simple need.”
Now, oh my god, let her preserve these syllables,
let nobody alter the rhythm, the color and the breathing
of these syllables,
that the tempest of passion or of reason is not awakened
in her.
Let her not remember.
Let not dogma or morals pocket that what she said
during the fast networks of the deep cells.
6.2
What nerve, what action,
what system should be expected?
How do we expect? Do what?
Even in the garbage, even lord in the garbage,
even in the deepest garbage,
the cord of the piano will break.
And the storm will break in some other way too
against the rocks in the sea.
Paupers, not anxious any more,
not disturbed by evil,
like this, no wind, no lord,
no eager comparisons,
no search, no sacrifice.
No comfort or its opposite
no sacred circle.
6.3
And all that, and all that, she said,
also resembles a hymn.
The shepherd could not be deceived.
They speak to the animal because they have lost god.
And even though it were god who lost us,
we can only go towards Him.
She said.
If you deny god, you come close to god.
If you destroy god,
you come to god through evil, because all the roads
belong to god.
Even the filthy remains that you lay on the earth
belong to god: trash, chemicals, gases,
everything comes out from your destruction of god.
Evil is the corpse of god.
The garbage dumps, the remains of god in you.
6.4
(And when you sleep with me in the room of the screens,
and when you sleep even though you have not taken me,
I feel there is nothing I can think of
and thought is broken in your body.
I cannot say what I feel either,
because this just happens:
thought breaks in your body
when you sleep,
in the room of the screens).
7.1
Cities like white crabs in the pampa
the fear of cats or of dark birds,
the big house with roses, what is lost,
the dew on the grass, the slash
of trees between the buildings,
isn’t the diver what is given to the senses including those of the neutral man?
The question falls like a coin on a plate.
The answer is better in the sound than in the meaning.
White mollusk, pampa, house, dew,
trees, slash,
diver.
And even in the word with slime deep down
garbage, fat, shot, night row,
sheets, violation, inferno are redeemed.
Evil is the deed, every deed.
An act, any act, a step,
tightening the watch.
What would you put in the children’s bedroom?
What would you put that you didn’t have to be sorry for later?
Kafka’s portrait or a teddy cat
could cause similar disasters.
7.2
The only possibility lies in Sodom.
He died there.
And however, we keep escaping from Sodom.
And coming back to Sodom and to Babel and to Kiev.
That we plunged into evil at last.
The action were true, he said, smoking.
Meanwhile, we remain still
and everything around us leaves.
7.3
Let’s see what happens anyway, he says.
And were it not for the let’s see, where,
I say, would we be, pilot on the Sahara,
Eskimo, aurora borealis’ enemy?
In the conversations, in fact,
women come up, the damned humidity,
and someone would like to do something about the shantytowns.
There is also the one that picks up a clover,
the one that does not hesitate when he passes in front of the garbage cans
full with the stinking bladders of the market
or the remains of pizza on the grass.
Your ordinary life, your true ordinary life.
Neither the action is no action nor is action no action there.
Who hasn’t smoked sitting on the bed without knowing why?
But you know, let’s see what happens.
Like someone who never knows how the business he has been keeping for years
will come out.
8.1
Hitting the water-pistol,
repairing, gathering the dry leaves,
burning leaves and trash,
threading leaves without singing,
he was the song.
And at work, the peace of the roads
and the action of evil.
And at rest, the intention, the tomb.
We are not going towards it nor coming back from it, he said,
turning his face with a gesture that at the beginning
seemed sinister.
8.2
You’ll stop teasing, he said, it was all an error
of the first molecule, all an error,
the grass that makes you go into raptures, the dew, you,
the liberation wars, Moses, your bedroom,
she wanted to reproduce herself equal to herself
but something went wrong, a regrettable chemistry error
the Bible confirms, writes a negative Gospel;
biology, a wrong development.
Once again you beat around the bush, he said.
The perfection of the error, I said, is astonishing.
8.3
Nobody passes on a gram of wisdom. There is not
a single gram of wisdom anywhere.
The revelation, if it could be called like this,
are these water drops the water hose pours,
the broken water-pistol, o any other object
that says nothing, absolutely nothing:
the worst boredom, the richest emptiness.
And each one will know his true heaven,
and each one the anxiety that leads him
to evil.
Ships are setting sails now.
From there, ships set sails and you aren’t there,
nor God.
8.4
The structure of the first cell
contained the circle and
every circle he opened contained
the circle,
and if all circles were to close
over the first,
the error would be repeated,
it would walk the opposite way,
from circle to circle,
supporting itself in a wonderful black tissue,
in the silk of his reverted dreams,
the error.
Don’t expect to kill evil neither strive for good,
the reed beds and rapid currents
and the heron and the mud
have no laws different to your impulse,
but they lack drama, ardor and sin.
Your intelligence spins around the swamp of the West,
beautiful before herself,
it should be worth the price you put on the last worm.
9.1
She returned home by the highway,
with the shopping from the market.
Never prayed again on the phone.
With the years she would know that the wound
would attack cyclically.
Like orderly robot armies,
Like good and foolish guerrillas.
That night and on other nights the wind blew
and the leaves sang before dying
the old incomprehensible song.
But she was, anyway, someone else.
Where did the energy that
had encouraged her go, and where
would everyone’s energy go
if they could look at the world thinning out
its immensity through the window,
shrinking the yearning?
This was an undeserved question
for his watchful rest,
for the unarmed wakefulness.
Had the universe done what it wanted?
what law?
He listened to the old man who could have told him:
don’t fully agree with,
don’t fully agree with the clothes of the devil.
When you stop talking to god,
he will leave his nest too.
9.2
The windows of a room I leave opened in winter
and those of the other room closed, heating one,
and the other in the winds that pour out from the abandoned
heart of the city.
I love, loved, all that plumbing, the storehouses
from whose cracks in the floors thistles grow
and other harsh plants. It could be said that the wind
comes from them. And the coldest the wind is
the more it looks like the alive breath of everything,
the opposite breath, the majesty of the heart,
power, power,
when the battle stops on the edges.
9.3
In this way you will not know who loved you.
You shall not be the first nor the last
that rules out from the battle and nevertheless
where is that which can be learned from them?
Let’s see how you could start a heart diet.
It is not because of this that your fingers know where
the night lamp stands and instinct guides you like a tightrope walker
over all the threads that make the day possible.
It is said: do not eat from that plate,
And, how could we save the condemned man?
How would we know that the worst among us must not die?
How would we rescue him anyway from the pus we are?
Because this is what it is all about when we say,
in a moving gesture for the planets:
let he who killed the son of the man live but be isolated.
It is not easy to get rid of the paradox
the Son brought upon us. It works like instinct
as if a blind device was rearming the escape
in a new diorama.
9.4
Imagine a Carnival of Saints,
a fair of divinities,
a universal holiday of ethics.
Is it then possible that the damage in your crystals,
the impertinence of the sun, the pain of certain figures
you call landscapes, diminish.
You will speak to the animal in such a way that
you will understand each other without register
and the movements of the lizards of the galaxies
escaping from themselves will not deliver sense.
Buddha did not write, nor Christ,
and that was the message, the means.
But it happens that I wanted to relate
the vast world of reptiles
with that of the severe hawks
and the pleasure that follows does not yield.
Walled, he launches flares on their extermination
like an unceasing Troy.
9.5
Sleeping in the winter nights, your home
under the planets and the gases of the cities;
sleeping in the nights of the cities,
your thought is a millstone of a rusty mill.
None of your fellow men knows if it comes against himself.
End is not conceivable,
not even for the armies in war.
And nevertheless it seems
that the metabolism of his thought
would poison his food all the more.
What else is there but to see them drown in robbery and innocence.
9.6
Walk the wind and there will be noise in the corridors.
The leaves anyway turn
towards those principles, the burrow,
the mandrill, the blunt depth of the undergrowth.
Ally of evil, friend of the vermin, only
in this way you will enjoy of something perceived as cosmic
and it could be said in meddled airs to some extent
—only to some extent—.
You will finally fell free to cancel your pacts,
lower your mite, taking delight in the body,
the wound healing with joyful itching.
Waiting for good, thriving on evil.
Book Three/ The Line of the Coyote
Some birds.
And nothing matters to me! God be forever praised.
Ricardo Molinari
A little box of soft wood and Chinese enamel
in the room where you would have finally done yourself in.
But you didn’t do yourself in or collapse, the gloomy bowsprit.
You wake up and you have to collect the steel from the water
and the ridge of the glass in the skimming of the air,
the ground heart and the singing in the grinding;
the transmission does not end
and overnight the fox in the Taiga roots in
among the decay of the Earth.
The traffic will resound in the alley behind the hospital.
It has rained. It hailed in the middle of the morning of the working week.
In the shadows: Discovery in colours, the fox
or the song of the fish trapped in the coral.
It is necessary that we all understand each other.
But there are the dead of an unyielding
cancer, built up every morning in your journal
that is also in colours.
This is important in any case. Never
from the pharmacy has the employee seen
a white stone curtain along the Avenue
in the best angle of a demolition
on the posters, the traffic. The tyres
undoubtedly slashed water from the pavement
with the form of an iguana’s crown.
In the eyes the story by the employee,
yet, the devilish tap
of the stones on the glass and on the marquee.
Yet, if she has been able to tell it
and at the pharmacy those who haven’t seen it
enjoy this story on the move, a mechanism
that is never fully understood, still works.
And it begins with the sirens in the morning
and birds that probably nest on the
nearby roofs, when trills in the storm
fill your patio.
Everything was clogged but continues operating.
Earth leeks water next to the stump of the urban tree.
Underground gas chambers, the flight
of bottles of plastic over brown torrents.
Watercolors in movement, ink of dreams.
Still, the house that shelters, the routine
fulfilled in the wet south-east wind, the River heading
towards the gorges, the tree with purple leaves
snatched by a wind with thunderclaps, the blanket.
Remember this morning, and try to remember what will come.
The red oil of the silence in the room,
the personal flight of each paper,
anyone expecting to read the mood and the dream of a god,
anyone seeking to read for himself /feeding inner cells,
anyone reading for the cycle of magnetized thoughts,
anyone reading to sooth the chemical processes,
anyone reading for the register of the hotel of the buried worlds.
They know, the natural forging
of materials is useless,
they struggle against it with unrivalled tenacity.
They hysterically follow the traces of the iguanas,
they shot the opposite flood of wings on the plains of the storks
they mimic the lesson of the fox without learning it well:
they try chains of concepts with warm legs.
The bays the inlets the natural raids
do not follow an evil proposition
and yet, the hunting, the swindling, the trap, the stalking
among the sibilant pines, the skilled Tomahawk.
Absolutely no living on small pigeons, in the line of the coyote,
rounds in search of neglect in the cycle of the large birds,
timeserving clown that simulates instinct in a gypsy howl.
Time, noon stalled between night dews,
but an unexpected wind where there were night showers
and riders in the courtyard.
What will the sinuous philosophy say?
a regular dream topography
the gaze on immediate destinies,
the stiff ear, the contempt
for irregular melting-pots,
the sudden disappearance of a city
does not change the course.
Everyone, without knowing, has read the large volumes.
They start the car and accelerate with softness or bitterness,
the feelings justified, whatever they are,
and the need to do what is done,
vassals rather than narcissists of the lost cause,
the fascinated hole in the head and no exit:
the door finally wrapped up in the mist.
Book Four/ Swamp
1
The water in the pan in the sink, where yerba
sticks float.
The green water.
2
Some things should happen in the clouds,
fast, as indicated by its color,
but instead, minutes are subtracted from a trip
that could plunge us into such and such essences.
It will be understood that we are talking about the century at its twilight,
with its exhausted handles among the objects
too different from desires, too far away.
Decayed hands, transparent, in layers of loose water.
Nothing is shackled, we consider the jump,
the deviations of a tube on the roof
and the warp on the wall of the corridor
that was not there before are astonishing.
When coming back to the bunker, the shadow is different, today
it is luminous, yesterday it was greener, diverse and heavy.
3
In spite of their pompous heads with little mobility
they have creeping eyes.
It is as if they had not lost the habit.
Operations that remain, the little ways
of evil between your fingers that remain.
Speedily but with ferocity excess
for so short dimensions they think before dying
in their blood lightning
that will not open roads to accumulation
or shall have to open paths for accumulation
in the impenetrable mountain, of little usufruct,
of the days that are still coming, postcard after postcard.
4
Lost in the truth for all efficient ferocity,
they claim that the place that was built, and belongs to them,
by working devotedly, by family strands
of capitalist exploitation, by traces of the personal commitment
they have invested in the mornings and in the evenings.
But the place has become unstable for them.
Abstraction guides their efforts through a map.
They invest and withdraw capitalization of blood
with electronic impulses and telephone orders.
They find themselves surlier when
they flee to corners with Acacias or Tilias
from which they come back totally absorbed in driving
the car, the voices of their conscience opening
to stories about blacksmiths, hard boys
of the warehouses, even about unmoral gunmen.
But not this: not even the chance to understand
the bewilderment of highways with its fast lights.
Lights posed with edges. Edges and far beyond
abstract fields or abstract dwellings or industrial
buildings and supermarkets with their distant order.
5
You see. Accumulation, deprived of honor.
The object with the viscous halo of an deranged
effort. The movement of hordes on the map,
Chinese in Manhattan Downtown, Russians in the Arcade.
Everybody is seizing the heroes, the signs
of emperors lost in the wholesome intelligence
of business. Recognition in the stock market.
Boxes, landscape layouts, dissolved marks of
swords, buried jewellery,
the stones of the Roman road covered
by geological layers, plantations and sheds.
6
Sometimes at night the roar is heard anyway
thousands of kilometers deep
reaching the surface with a unceasing trepidation.
How long can the sperm whale stay submerged?
Down below, down below this unlikely movement.
Down below, down below of the virtual images.
7
There are nettles steady in my head.
There are rows of trees with every detail of their bark.
Can the ground be steady when dusk
is full of unstable bangs and open vacuum?
In our head everything seems tilled with small daggers,
with the ferocity of a Centurion, with the zeal of a monarch.
In the head voices are true though dark,
or perhaps true by dark.
Noises concern us, the wavering of certain blows.
But your face is not like this. The universe of the investor
collects echoes like little burps from closed docks.
Its real world includes close faces
open in a host of motorways and toll roads.
And full white appears on them sometimes:
complete density or full completeness,
the end of the Araucaria and the completion of the number.
8
They are not seen in Mexico and Quito. The need, the theft
are there mixed with the sun, the toxic clouds,
the sawdust and in the events taking place in finished
objects. They are not seen. It is a dirty gauze to the air.
They are abstract like the cosmos the look at.
The great captors have been broken up in the lines
were drawn on the screens of their brains.
9
Smell of wood or death still govern at some displaced
point. And more displaced when it is followed,
as if the control of the movement closed on them.
When running to the limit, the time being runs,
they are never included, the overwhelming theorem sticks
them to expanded areas by their mechanisms. Barbarians
whose invasion is not consumed even if they win over lands.
Man of pain and senses long ago;
and the time of man goes with them
as a globular shadow no longer conquerable.
10
Someone, even they, keep the entrance to an obsolete port.
There, plants grew between stones, and close to rusted
lanterns. This is not, in his memory, an end. It is spaciousness.
There, the universe settled like a pollen rain.
There, death saffron, or the life of minute flies.
The current lasts when it moves rust. Humidity penetrating
the forgotten ropes, the straw mattress stranded behind of the wall,
at the same time, bricks covered in black or green moss.
11
Did they see it? The huge feast of thumbnails or large scales
in which deaths and days, the Earth, and built cosmos
carried a time of circular secrets.
Then, a sweat of things rose into the air
where marinated again, so that history
was crossed by canals, open by canals,
traversed by canals of light and wind
permeable to desolation, to feeling,
to diffuse and magnet identity, to the rumor of hummingbirds
that descended to the sound of weapons
and of tools, and revolved
around the warehouse whose alphabet secretly spoke
the glory of livestock, the dramatic silence.
12
Time of good shadow. The deposited body
at last in the stick loom of the event.
The open window to, however,
is real in the circuits outside,
the police round, neon signs, papers
swept from the last metropolis.
Time of breathing and the minute relics.
Of signs searched for in the crack.
The sleepwalking tap drips anyway.
In the gigantic accumulation the plumage of a fossil
bird flaps, streaks of coal burn
to die.
Jorge Aulicino, La línea del coyote, Ediciones del Dock, Buenos Aires, 1999
© por la versión: Silvia Camerotto
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