Carlos Drummond de Andrade – The Girl Reveals a Thigh

The Girl Reveals a Thigh

The girl reveals a thigh,
the girl reveals an ass cheek,
only she doesn’t show me that thing
— conch shell, beryl, emerald —
which blossoms, with four petals,
and contains the most sumptuous
pleasure, that hyperboreal zone,
a mixture of honey and asphalt,
a door sealed at the hinges
with a giddiness held captive,
a sacrificial altar without
the blood of the rite, the girl
doesn’t show me that thing.
And she is torturing me, this virgin
with her modesty making me dizzy
from the sudden blow struck
by a vision of her luminous breasts,
her pink and black beauty
that winds itself into a ball,
wrinkled, intact, inaccessible,
that opens, then closes, then takes flight
and this female animal, by laughing,
dismisses what I might have asked her about,
about what should be given and even beyond
given, what should be eaten.
Oh, how the girl kills me,
turns my life into one in which
all hope is consumed
by shadow and sparkle.
Rubbing up against her leg. The fingers
discover the slow, curving,
animal-like secrets, yet
they are the greatest mystery,
always crude, nocturnal,
the three-pronged key to the urn,
this concealed craziness, it doesn’t
give me anything to go on at all.
Before it never would have provoked me.
Living didn’t have a purpose,
the feelings walked around lost,
time wasn’t set loose
nor did death come to subject me
to the light of the morningstar,
which at this hour is already the first star,
violent, rising up like nausea
in the wild beasts at the zoo.
How I might know her skin,
where it is concave and convex,
her pores, the golden skin
of her belly! But her sex
has been kept a secret of the state.
How I might know the cold, dewy
meadow of her flesh,
where a snake rouses from sleep
and traces its path
back and forth, among all the tremors!
But what perfume would there be
in an unseen cave? what enchantment
what tightness, what sweetness,
what pure, pristine line
calls me and leads me away?
It might offer me all its beauty
and I would kiss or bite
and draw blood: I would.
But her pubis refuses me.
In the burning night, in the day
her thighs come together.
Like a deserted inn
closed on the inside by a latch,
her thighs seal themselves,
seclude themselves, save themselves,
and who said that
I could make her my slave?
I could debate this possibility
without a glimmer of hope for victory,
already her body erases itself,
already its glory tarnishes,
already I am made different by that thing
which wounds me on the inside,
and now I don’t know for certain
if my thirst was more ferocious because of
that thing of hers that I might have possessed.
There are other fountains, other hungers,
other thighs of other animals: the world is
vast and the forgetting profound.
Maybe today the girl in the daylight . . .
Maybe. For certain it never will be.
And if it hides itself away
with such fugues and arabesques
and such stubborn secrecy,
on what day will it open?
What would need to change for it to offer
itself to me on an already cold night,
its pink and black blossom in the snow,
never visited by me,
that boat carrying incense that I can’t board?
Or is there no boat carrying incense at all . . .

* * *

other than inward

alone on a dreams forgotten shore
that stray thundering sea
reached towards the sky

wind creased and folded grass,
elemental human hearts
away from pale insignificance
chime together

the fire has not vanished
silent dune blue air,
these memories will scar

and no holy intervention
can claim a dedicated tear

sigh and embrace
an eloquent arrival of intimacy
ripe silent love

ingest the once plain indifference
short breath saliva glisten

someone else can trace you
by indentation in the sand
and what sea birds say
in discordant voice

Piedad Bonnett – Circle and Ash

Your mouth comes to me, only your mouth.
comes flying
dragonfly blood flare
that lights my night this ash.
entire sea salt dwelling in her,
the whole sound of the sea,
all foam.
Boca drawn for kisses ,
where tantalizing your tongue sleep.
entire world wine is in your mouth,
all the sin
and all innocence.
Boca shut up and when he says, hidden.
Capable of your mouth the whole truth,
the whole truth and lies.
Laugh your mouth and wake up the day.
(Lightning snow there in your laughter.)
As a herd of ponies run over me
kissing your delicious mouth,
your mouth, butterfly wrong,
your mouth others that is blurred
in my circle night and ash.

Mario Bojorquez – Award

As the last day does not return You’ll never be that high voice Tundía under the breath of infinite almonds A lullaby to his chest You will not have to be that That shade of a poplar Rent the air with scattered notes The subtle scent of an afternoon on the river There will be no day you return to your expense Filled with memories of the dark obsequious Solar excessive idleness Cerns perfect As the last day does not return You never on your own steps A walking path open for you In the garden that keeps your memory Not even in deserted Frond you will have to tread To you because transit between fig fruit Pomegranates, flowers at your feet You’re just now that you did not want You’re the one who did not know what he wanted to say Greedy mouth no fruit chews That spoiled, bitch, feast and festival You’re the insaciado looking with envy The overwhelming joy of others Whoever hurts to the bone for the innocent laughter It will cloud your eyes with anger It will swell cruel hands remorse It poisons your blood What fire, what abandonment How miserable are the shores of life As the last day does not return No back in you will concoct bells Holidays in flowered fields Neither your hands browned wheat of eras Nor whiten your snow on your mill As if you had closed universe In a thick fog that prevents you Learn what the rock crevice That must be the source where you drink As if the universe against you Injected into the air that poison Bending your knees So as the day turns A spin on its hinges hours and passes And overhead the sun will go down Lost to So you lose So as you lose you lose The scent in the air that always blows hard You’ll miss so terribly That to your eyes can recognize your own skin Neither your ears hear your voice As if talking on another that you Not even your blood It will respond pálpito And the tongue utter A language that is unknown to you today. Do not grieve Hurt to lose. You call Bitter, in your gums It will bloom a garden of tree-scale And in your head start seborrhea high tufts Niagara mist in your eyes You call without reproach wounded The living skin ulcer land where you step Without faith you call And there will be another you Built in penalty That round will infect Leprosy is righteous It must distinguish in the market The mob cried He will announce you arrive The stench of your acids The clear bell is anticipated And you wondered why back Why and what And what return If the return would smell bouquets awaiting your step If yes minor fronds fruit curds, cheerful blooms, light concrete and acid, And back with an army of sources nymphs dancing for you If I go back in the water, ductile, light, fluent, if in the air If you awaken in the back you are, if you come back spin, spinning, start from yourself If you become, if you founded back, come back without hesitation Although recent days should not happen again

Birago Diop – Spirits

Listen to Things

More often than Beings,

Hear the voice of fire,

Hear the voice of water.

Listen in the wind,

To the sighs of the bush;

This is the ancestors breathing.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;

They are in the darkness that grows lighter

And in the darkness that grows darker.

The dead are not down in the earth;

They are in the trembling of the trees

In the groaning of the woods,

In the water that runs,

In the water that sleeps,

They are in the hut, they are in the crowd:

The dead are not dead.

Listen to things

More often than beings,

Hear the voice of fire,

Hear the voice of water.

Listen in the wind,

To the bush that is sighing:

This is the breathing of ancestors,

Who have not gone away

Who are not under earth

Who are not really dead.

Those who are dead are not ever gone;

They are in a woman’s breast,

In the wailing of a child,

And the burning of a log,

In the moaning rock,

In the weeping grasses,

In the forest and the home.

The dead are not dead.

Listen more often

To Things than to Beings,

Hear the voice of fire,

Hear the voice of water.

Listen in the wind to

The bush that is sobbing:

This is the ancestors breathing.

Each day they renew ancient bonds,

Ancient bonds that hold fast

Binding our lot to their law,

To the will of the spirits stronger than we

To the spell of our dead who are not really dead,

Whose covenant binds us to life,

Whose authority binds to their will,

The will of the spirits that stir

In the bed of the river, on the banks of the river,

The breathing of spirits

Who moan in the rocks and weep in the grasses.

Spirits inhabit

The darkness that lightens, the darkness that darkens,

The quivering tree, the murmuring wood,

The water that runs and the water that sleeps:

Spirits much stronger than we,

The breathing of the dead who are not really dead,

Of the dead who are not really gone,

Of the dead now no more in the earth.

Listen to Things

More often than Beings,

Hear the voice of fire,

Hear the voice of water.

Listen in the wind,

To the bush that is sobbing:

This is the ancestors, breathing

Léopold Sédar Senghor – Elegy Of Midnight

 

Summer, splendid Summer, nourishing the Poet on the milk of your light
I who grew up like the wheat of spring, which made me drunk
From green water, from the green steaming in the gold of Time
Ah! no longer can I tolerate the midnight light.
The splendor of such honors resembles a Sahara,
An immense void, with neither erg nor rocky plateau,
With no grass, no twinkling eye, no beating heart.
Twenty-four hours a day like this, and my eyes are wide open
Like Father Cloarec’s, crucified on a boulder by the Joal pagans
Who worshipped snakes. In my eyes the Portuguese lighthouse
Turns round and round, twenty-four hours a day,
A precise and restless mechanism, until the end of time.

I jumped out of bed, a leopard about to be snared,
A sudden gust of Simoom filling my throat with sand.
Ah! if I could just collapse in the dung and blood, in the void.
I turn around among my books watchilng me with their deep eyes
Six thousand lamps burning twenty-four hours a day.
I stand up lucid, strangely lucid. And I am handsome,
Like the one-hundred-runner, like the rutting black stallion
From Mauritania. I carry in my blood a river of seeds
That can fertilize all the plains of Byzantium
And the hills, the austere hills.
I am the Lover and the locomotive with a well-oiled piston.

Her sweet strawberry lips, her thick stone body,
Her secret softness ripe for the catch, her body
A deep field open to the black sower.
The Spirit germinates under the groin, in the matrix of desire
The sex is one antenna mong many where flashing messages are exchanged.
Love music no longer can cool me down, nor the holy rhythm of poetry.
Against this despair, Lord, I need all my strength
—A soft dagger in the heart as deep as remorse.
I am not sure of dying. If that was Hell: the lack of sleep
This desert of the Poet, this pain of living, this dying
From not being able to die, the agony of shadows, this passion
For death and light like moths on hurricane lamps at night,
In the horrible rotting of virgin forests.

Lord of light and shadows,
You, Lord of the Cosmos, let me rest in Joal-of-the-Shades,
Let me be born again in the Childhood Kingdom full of dreams,
Let me be the shepherd of my shepherdess on the Dyilôr tanns
Where dead men flower, let me burst out applauding
When Téning-Ndyaré and Tyagoum-Ndyaré enter the circle
And let me dance like the Athlete to the drum of this year’s Dead.
This is only a prayer. You known my peasant’s patience.
Peace will come, the Angel of dawn will come, the singing of birds
Never heard before will come, the light of dawn will come.
I will sleep at dawn, my pink doll in my arms,
My green- and gold-eyed doll with a voice so marvelous,
It is the very tongue of poetry.

—Translated from the French by Melvin Dixon

(from Nocturnes, 1961)

Jean-Claude Pirotte – Poème (2006)

Jean-Claude Pirotte – Poème (2006).

Robert Creely – To And

Martin Adan – Sea and Shell

A woman and a ball: out of a sudden agreement
the world forms, in its inane rotation.
It begins with the fish, which inhabits the wasteland.

A curve sighs. Nothing swells immediately.
A mathematical point: the sphere,
void, terrestrial, a cloud of breath.

If the chimera doesn’t declare itself
in service and pure verse,
it will wail its words of truth.

The world revolves in an animal rush.
The most humble fish, of all the mud,
mired in the eye, bearing the colure.

A leg, or terror, arises, expands:
the air is the passion of the bather:
light, in recess, flashes and dies out.

A woman and a ball drop from a bristle,
a thin line of ice in which everything concludes,
matter the hand raises into view.

World in the air, simple being and aspect:
algae rising boldly within the descent.
A fish that bites its own tail bleeds mud.

Fabio, this passage and flow and writhing I’m thinking of
is the world: element, eruption: everything, nothing,
in the immense power.

From the rhythm: figures and the first creed,
and happiness, a lesson for the universe as it rolls
into time, pulling along its shell and ancient verse.

translated by Katie Silver and Rick London

Olga Orozco- No Doors

With burning sands styling a number of fire over time,

law with a wild animal lurking danger from its burrow,

with vertigo looking up,

your love is kindled but a lamp in the middle of the night,

with small fragments of a world consecrated to idolatry,

with the sweetness of sleep with all your skin covering the cost of fear

in the shadow of leisure tenderly opened a range of celestial meadows,

did everyday loneliness I have.

My loneliness is made of you.

Take your name on your side of stone

in tense silence where they can play all the melodies of hell;

walk beside me with your empty step,

and has, like you, that look that I’m going to look farther each time,

yesterday to a glare that dissolves in tears, in ever.

The doors to my left as one leaves the heir to a

                   [Realm of anyone who goes out and never comes back.

And it grew by itself

feeding on these herbs that grow on the edges of memories

and on stormy nights produce mysterious mirages

scenes with the best bonfires fed fevers.

Well I’ve seen people with blurred malls who sacrifice love

-Invincible characters marble, blind-absorbed as the distance,

or deploy in the middle of a room that rain falling seaside

away in another part ¨,

where you will be filling the bowl with water a few years of neglect.

Sometimes blowing on me with a south wind

a stormy song that suddenly breaks into a broken throat groan of bliss,

or try to delete a piece of ragged hope

goodbye that you wrote with the blood of my dreams in all crystals

to smite everything I watch.

My loneliness is all I have of you.

Howl with your voice in every corner.

When named with your name

grows like a sore in the darkness.

And a sunset up in front of me

that cup of sky was the color of wet poplar and in which

                            [We have drunk the wine of eternity each day,

broke and not knowing, to open the veins,

for you were born as a god of his splendid duel.

And he could not die

and his look was that of a madwoman.

He opened a wall

and walked into this room with a room that has no outputs

and where you’re sitting, staring at you in another life like my solitude.