Purgatory 33
Open your breast to the coming truth
and reach out your hands,
and bare your heart,
and broaden your mind,
and blow up your brains,
and hone your nose, tongue and ears,
chip off your lids and show me your eyes.
Gut your soul: swell it!
An alien just touched down on your balcony,
ships and all.
I inherited the well-turned phrase,
but they shortened—my name,
and I grew up just a chatty child.
If, for all she said, she didn’t escape
the whips, the hooks, or the stake,
if her god could only just cover up
her dignity with snow,
for me, a defiant youth, death
awaits, bloody and unkind.
The cyclogenesis has been foretold.
But I will step forward and declare
—freely: this Love,
I will not gag it, even
if my mouth, crow-filled,
doveless, should burst.
Silence: the earth will give birth to a tree.
Altazor, Vicente Huidobro
My nightmares have so much flesh
that I wake up in a sweat, as though I’d let you inside
a rainy season in India, and I recall
just the smells—your voice, a sitar—
And me as mighty cow, offering me up to day.
These dead don’t stink like dead.
The skinny moon bathes their faces,
and a bed of leaves brightens their sores,
and they smell of feathers from ravens and woodpeckers,
but, especially, rooting in the rocks,
in the rocks that make them at home in the holy grounds:
none of you will see a worm, or even a fly
the slime of no snail could wipe away their names.
And in August the roses bloom, too.
