La vida escandalosa de César Moro / César Moro

The Scandalous Life of César Moro

Disperse me in the rain or in the cloud of smoke from the torrents that pass
At the margins of the night in which we see ourselves after the running of the clouds
That reveal themselves to the eyes of the lovers who emerge
From their powerful castles of towers of blood and ice
To stain the ice scratch the leap of late returns
My friend the King brings me closer to his royal and royal tomb
Where Wagner stands guard by the door with the faithfulness
Of the dog gnawing the bone of glory
While intermittent and divinely fatal rains
Corrode the aerial streetcar haircut of relapsed seahorses
And murderers passing through the sublime terrace of apparitions
In the solemn carnivorous and bituminous forest
Where the strange passersby intoxicate their opened eyes
Beneath large catapults and elephantine ram heads
Suspended according to the taste of Babylon or Trastevere
The river that crowns your terrestrial apparition emerging from mother
Precipitates itself furious like a ray over the day’s vestiges
Fallacious crowding of medals of sponges of crossbows
A winged bull of significant happiness bites the breast or cupola
Of a temple that emerges in the ignominious light of day or amidst the rotten and light branches of the forest hecatomb
Disperse me in the flight of migratory horses
In the alluvion of dregs crowning the day’s longeval volcano
In the terrifying vision that pursues man at the approach of the astonishing hour among hours, midday
When the boiling ballerinas are about to be decapitated
And man pales in the terrifying suspicion of the definitive apparition carrying in its teeth the legible oracle as follows:

     “A pocket knife over the cauldron cuts through a pig hair brush of ultra-sensitive dimensions; at the day’s proximity the pigs are elongated until they touch twilight; when night approaches the pigs transform themselves into a dairy of modest and peasant appearance. Over the pocket knife a falcon flies devouring an enigma in the form of vapor condensation; sometimes it is a basket stuffed with animal eyes and love letters filled with a single letter; other times a laborious dog devours a cabin lit up from within. The absorbing darkness can be interpreted as an absence of thought provoked by the invisible proximity of a subterranean pond inhabited by turtles of the first magnitude.”

The wind rises over the royal tomb
Ludwig II of Bavaria awakens amid the debris of the world
And emerges to visit me bringing through the surrounding forest
A moribund tiger
The trees fly off to be seeds and the forest disappears
And covers itself with creeping fog
Myriads of insects now free deafen the air
At the step of the two most beautiful tigers in the world




La tortuga ecuestre (1938-1939)




{ César Moro, La tortuga ecuestre y otros textos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976 }