Nuevo mundo / Rafael Cadenas

New World

1

I have burned the formulas. I stopped performing exorcisms. My legacy, the ancient power, remains distant. Bonfire's breath in my nostrils, my disintegrated language, the still-humid shadow of a dilemma.
Another life proceeds in darkness like a vein of water.
The entire displacement has existed in order to exile me, to live within another articulation.


2

Dawn papers. They always refer to the adopted homeland, the one I have given myself. Papers piled up as though for ceremony.
Sacrifice to an ebony god.


3

Those invariable writings.

I always return to the same language. Leather haunted by an animal. A fugitive, though present like an ancestor’s life.

Weaving over weaving, love’s dead tongue, a fire which has made me an addict of an insinuating cult.


4

The dawn does not return my final amulet. An old man signals from a beach. I try to return to the springs, but I don’t know the road.


5

My shadow enters.
It brings a serpent, a buffalo, a woman, a house, a pier.
The intoxication of savage copper.
Advance, advance.
Drug.

Overpowers what I observe.
Begins to mark here and there, everything.
Then escapes to join the animal.
Lost like a bird amid leaves.


6

Memory embarks in search of escaped things. Possessions belonging less to their owner than to air. What a wooden chest wants to protect was not born for words. I am the only one who labors to steal it from the eyes.


7

I proceed, making way through the roughness, toward the spot where my future portrait is kept.


8

A remote fire sustains me. I borrow from its red aura.
Hallway toward incandescence, you deny installments.


9

Vegetable orgy.
A naked woman lies beneath the rain.

Textures where an absence watches itself.

Guide me, aromatic cave.


10

Traces never recovered.

Suddenly, a graze. The skin’s universe. The thread lost on the journey.
I am bathed by what lives, by what dies.
Each day is the first day, each night the first night and I, I am also the first resident.




{ Rafael Cadenas, Memorial, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1977 }