Poems from quebrada de la virgen / Armando Rojas Guardia


Poemas de quebrada de la virgen (Caracas: Fundarte, 1985)



25


Just like at times we'd like to have seen
Karl Marx and Arthur Rimbaud
meet at a table
in some London cafe
while in the Thames' deaf water
--clouded by oily patches
floating between bottles and stubs
and the grey clothing of the drowned--
the Drunken Boat awaits, already unanchored,
waiting for the specter to cover Europe
and to get on at last, to sail off
(Karl, dressed in blue jeans for sailing,
says goodbye to Engels at the dock
and Tahur does the same to Verlaine
--the insolent dreams stored until now
in the cap that he wore at the Commune);
just like, at this stage, we'd like it
if Hegel, honored by the platform of his seminar,
could have visited Holderlin one afternoon,
at his hidden tower hospital
to listen to the demented poet
--without recognizing him, perhaps--
speak to him of an old friend from Tubinga
with whom, in the middle of an adolescent party,
he danced one morning, next to a tree
they had planted and grown
(They'd call it "Liberty")
as fierce and happy as children peeing
with the audacity of dogs, in front of the king
(within the monochord summer's sleep,
remembering the sweetest girlfriends from Heidelburg,
the two companions confess:
Reason must ask Madness for
her irreductible dance, the innocence
with which the mad Hyperion, from his tower,
explains to the professor about the white light,
the rose of the Spirit's winds,
it doesn't end in the Cesar's State
mocking the Prussians's Kaisers);
I would wish that William Blake were allowed
one single day to preach today
above the carved pulpit of a church
--Westminster Abbey, for example--
in the presence of Archbishops and priests,
and a multitude of worshipers
sick, as everyone is, of sermons.
I imagine the sacred wind resonating
for the first time, next to the marble slabs,
while the bodies, naked at last,
as in the hour of water or love,
bristle with the passage of this living god
and they tremble at the aroma of Christ the Tiger
devouring the soul's edges,
now so intact, so drunk, such virgins
as when that greying child saw angels
at the hour in which Venus burns over Lambeth
and even the prostitutes of Soho are prophets.