Primary Signs
I
At the doors of your life there is a single house. Between your image and the horizon, eagle on no centinel’s shoulder, she lets herself be. At times unruly against your love, she transcends the created, the flower and the water. She rectifies, with multiple bifurcations points out the today of your yesterday. She scrapes out the crazy bite of the scar and the dust. You open a crack in the mist to touch the inside, with no guilt, the pulp of your fleece. You float directly toward her flanks and her walls, you walk through immobile hallways with your gold ring that belongs to the dream. Who wants to float up the stairs to make a chain link of time within specific space, who clothes you and doesn’t exile the angel on your forehead in the immense morning, under the weight and deaf rumor of your real and invisible house?
II
Did your grandparents kindle timber, gifts, or legends here? In their moment, they were chosen to live another form and, even in their hours emptied for us, their sadness is amorous unconscious. Our adhesion, which is made of bones, marrow, and visceral foam, wakes them from the longest dream. We have two options when we face them: faithfulness and candor and, during the dialogue, to shake up memory at the mercy of our yesterday or show them a thin volume of errant stars here on earth, or fanatical dead roses with the dark fire that borders the precipices.
III
As one who erases a phrase from an
endless manuscript,
large, arboreous window shades rain,
spring and youth run, a river
slides very lazily in the grass.
The lips on a crevice over our root.
We pass.
(The red mouth is muteness.)
(Without a tear we eat the dead.)
Time still passes.
(The last rose that our exclusive sister brings.)
IV
We filled a basket with hard stones and we saw that it was a white or black steppe, where wild desires trot, we later forged through the great river they name destiny like in a dream, through the wall of sunflowers and the glitter of song, very happy to follow and to elapse.
V
My shadow belongs to no one. The open road is yours and no one’s.
My light belongs to no one: it curves in my pockets like just another shadow, the sunflower’s nothingness in common.
VI
No one sees these eyes, desperate eyes like things written in dreams. No one sees me seated on a gold chair playing the universe with only the tide that grazes lip to lip, while I tune my flute to the law of the birds.
VII
to Juan Liscano
You have your own name
if you excavate within
and reject your fear of dying
that leads to dying
and if you accept the verb that guides
toward silence.
Written time stone tossed here
at our side
with the fragile stalks in which the spirit revives.
Free me by my hunger, from my hunger
and by my thirst, from my thirst.
VIII
Echo of a disobedient rumor
a rose secretly segregates
and carries me, insomniac,
within real or illusory living
without a soundless north, Rose Selavy.
IX
The words sound like gold animals.
Scaring off the limits, you will drench the all and nothingness to suffocate vertigo, and they will become girls made of cotton.
X
We have begun with a speech and
with oblique phrases we love
and their silvery blue rooster heads.
We have begun, or not, sweet and
growling lady, and the secret enumeration
runs in the wind, over the purest
and incomprehensible errand, as we
walk by blurred, more or less mutilated.
XI
Less oblique than my dead man’s face, and desirous, a fish plunges; in the nebulous tower of the sea goes the fish, without the roseate eye of my guilt. One hundred times I clamor like the seizable diamond fish, with the nocturnal strangeness in my mouth.
XII
I sustain the tree that I grow. And the round star is covered by the jungle of spells. You walk by barefoot, like the lightning inside the heart of the crust. I polish lamps with my index finger on your breast. A visionary girl looks for me in the sun of the blonde flowerpots and I focus the utmost attention on her until I inscribe her name within reality and cultivate my desire.
Rasgos comunes (1975)
{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Poesía, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }
