César Moro / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen

César Moro

Through a field of breadcrumbs the little hand of a clock extends itself
     disproportionally
A pair of crab or serpent eyes alternately light up or turn off on it
Against the light emerges a smoke cloud of embroidered eyelashes
And disposed like a tower that simulates a woman who undresses
Other more familiar animals like the hippopotamus or the elephant
Find their path amid bone and meat
A web of medusa eyes impedes transit
Through the sand that extends like an abandoned hand
At each step an ivory ball says whether the air is green or black
If the eyes weigh the same on a scale crossed by hairs
And locked in an aquarium installed in the heights of a mountain
Sometimes stopping and sometimes tossing like a catapult
Pink or black or green cadavers of children at the eight extremes
Cadavers painted according to zebras or leopards
And that open up so beautifully like a box of trash when they fall
Spread out in the middle of a patio of pink marble




1935




{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }

Poema recortado / César Moro

Clipped Poem

For the first time
thirteen fugitives
remember
HEROINES
tree leaves
ancient women

THE UNKNOWN AIRMEN
completely inoffensive
crackling

From 61 to 65 years old
I will not die of pneumonia

Crested tulips
some crimpers to curl
A REVOLVER
Apollo and a fig tree
a venomous flower
an olive tree

A CLOCK
a hill full of pockets
a cup
a laurel
a chord
a parrot
one on top
four slight wheels

A COW
the golden West

A leather overcoat
poplar and beech trees
a rag soaked in alcohol
a warrior without a sword
an elephant
three common dancers
a willow tree
a hand in the shade
a Bulgarian photograph
a bucket of water
a doble prism of spar from Iceland
a wagon
the exact reproduction of a drawing as small as we’d like
a PROBABLE photograph
a small room
a laiza of selenium
in a basket
TWO RINGS
a cancer of the mouth
accompanied by pure and delicious victuals
a flask with flint spouts
a young lady with a revolver
dough that’s too dry
semi-crystalized dry dough
dough that’s too big
AND THE STARS OF OPERA UNANIMOMOUSLY
warm up
dreams




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

Alfabeto de las actitudes / César Moro

Alphabet of Attitudes

Is absence not, for whoever loves, the most efficacious, the most indestructible, the most faithful of presences?
MARCEL PROUST
(Les plaisirs et les jours)

DECEMBER, 1935:

     A gypsy girl comes out of an old house, on Avenue Grau, through the open wicket in the big door, closed. The girl, barefoot, heads toward a straw hat, for a man, knocked over a few steps away, the top inverted, in front of the big door. The girl introduces her left foot in the hat. At that moment another girl comes along the street. The gypsy girl stretches her arms out to her and leans her left arm with familiarity on the girl’s shoulder. They remain like that, without speaking a word, for a moment. Then the girl who has arrived leaves smiling at the gypsy girl.


11th OF JANUARY OF 1936

     When I proceed to open the door of the place called “Museum” there is a man dressed in a blue work blazer in the clock tower of the hospital 十 十 十. He stands out distinctly over the sphere, his arms in a cross, fixing the clock’s dials. Seconds later, when I open the door, he quickly turns his head: several crows fly in the field of the sphere.

                214 ideographic signs
                or 2419 or more
                any story’s din
                climbs the tree from the other side climbs
                arrives from the far edge
                cleaning the clock’s hours
                the little instantaneous man.


JANUARY, 1953:

     It’s unexplainable that man tries to fill his solitude with noise: radio, television, modern architecture are abject, abominable. Journalism was already enough as an efficient mechanism of cretinization.
     While eternity is constituted by minimal vegetative variations and imperceptible atmospheric alterations shining under a forest of orange trees or cypresses.
     The first unbearable revelation of eternal life shone in a leg.
     I can speak about eternity better than the Pope.
     Every life reaches a crossroads in which torment reigns like a monstrous pullulation: pharisaism, philistinism, the mistaken intended similar opinions, the most nefarious assent that frank opposition, hatred against myth, the abandonment of all ideals drown, mark, crush and debase.
     That alternating of obsessive negative thinking with the obsessive pleasant memory is the torment of irrevocable lucidity.
     Guilt has no exit, relief, stillness, save in the momentous loss of lucidity.
     Man is alone with the sea amidst mankind.
     Impotence of desire. While man does not realize his desire the world disappears as reality to transform itself in a nightmare from the cradle to the sepulcher.
     Is there no rhythm that is not our own? Suddenly my veins branch out, grow and I live the world’s pulsing.
     I dreamed a car was taking me toward eternity. I was able to wake up and I didn’t want to know the hour.
     Scorpions guard the horrible subsoil of eternity.
     I wake up in the middle of the night and wait for the discrete call. But it’s the wind and nothing else.


First published by André Coyné in Cultura (Lima, No. 1, 1956).




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

Estrella fugaz / César Moro

Fleeting Star

Oh fate always bound
To the splashing to the usury of the wind
Nocturnal appearance of subdued glow
Winter passes the light
With free nails on a heart without armature
Sharpens its lioness claws

Beautiful night of ancient wounds
Rough wind tender darkness
Keep the moveable castle

May a star fall
Over the nacre blood
Over the alabaster breast
Over the lungs of snow
Under the feet of nocturnal fire

Oh free Night      to you
Forever      Oh word




From Le Château de Grisou (1943)




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

André Breton / César Moro

André Breton

Like a piano of a horse’s tail of a wake of stars
On the lugubrious firmament
Heavy with coagulated blood
Swirling rainbow clouds phalanxes and planets and myriads of
     birds
The indelible fire advances
The cypresses burn the tigers panthers and the noble animals
     become incandescent

The care of dawn has been abandoned
And night looms over the devastated earth

The district of treasures keeps his name forever

                                                               Mexico, April 1938




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

La leve pisada del demonio nocturno / César Moro

The Light Step of the Nocturnal Demon

In the great contact of oblivion
Certainly dead
Trying to steal reality from you
By the deafening rumor of the real
I lift a statue of such pure mud
Of clay of my blood
Of lucid shadow of intact hunger
Of interminable panting
And you rise like an unknown star
With your hair of black sparks
With your rabid and indomitable body
With your breath of wet stone
With your crystal head
With your ears of drowsiness
With your lantern lips
With your fern tongue
With your saliva of magnetic fluency
With your rhythm nostrils
With your fire tongue feet
With your legs of thousands of petrified tears
With your eyes of a nocturnal leap
With your tiger teeth
With your veins of violin arc
With your orchestra fingers
With your nails to open the heart of the world
And predict the loss of the world
In the heart of dawn
With your warm forest armpits
Under the rain of your blood
With your elastic lips of carnivorous plant
With your shadow that intercepts the noise
Nocturnal demon
This is how you rise forever
Stomping on the world that ignores you
And loves your name without knowing it
And moans after the smell of your step
Of fire of sulfur of air of tempest
Of intangible catastrophe that diminishes each day
That portion in which are hidden nefarious designs and the suspicion
     that twists the mouth of the tiger who spits in the mornings to
     make the day




La tortuga ecuestre (1938-1939)




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

Westphalen / César Moro

Westphalen

Like a watering hole for indelible beasts
Split by the lightning overflowing the water
Reflects the migration of earth birds
In the night of the salubrious earth

A front door closed over a barren field
Refuge of clandestine love
An equality of stone that closes under
The drop of water that rises from the earth

Over hundreds of decapitated heads
A naked woman like a lamp

Makes the eyes of the dead shine
Like fish of trails of argentiferous little fibers
Gold and steel know their destiny
Of rotten earth the pullulating jungle
Accompanies him and pours over the shoulders
Of ghosts familiar arborescent mantles
Cascades of blood and myriads of noses

                                                            10 of January of 1938




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

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 }

Carta de amor / César Moro

Love Letter

I think of the holothurians who would often surround
     us when dawn drew near
when your feet warmer then nests
burned in the night
with a blue and sparkling light

I think of your body that made the bed a sky and the
     supreme mountains
of the only reality
with its valleys and its shadows
with humidity and marble and the black water reflecting
     all the stars
in each eye

Wasn’t your smile the resonant forest of my childhood
weren’t you the spring
the stone chosen centuries ago to recline my head?
I think your face
immobile hot coal point of departure for the Milky Way
and that immense sorrow that makes me crazier than a
     flaming agitated spider over the sea

Impossible when I remember you the human voice is odious
always the vegetable rumor of your words isolates me in
     total night
where you shine with blackness more black than night
Every idea of blackness is too weak to express the long
     ululation of black on black fervently
     shining

I will never forget
But who speaks of oblivion
in the prison to which your absence leaves me
in the solitude to which this poem abandons me
in the exile where each hour finds me

I will no longer wake up
I will no longer resist the assault of the big waves
that come from the blessed landscape you inhabit
Outside under the nocturnal cold I wander
over that plank placed so high above and from where
     one falls suddenly

Stiff beneath the terror of successive dreams agitated
     in the wind
of years of reverie
warned of what ends up finding itself dead
in the threshold of deserted castles
at the time and place agreed upon but unfindable
in the fertile plains of paroxysm
and of the only objective
I place all my dexterity toward deciphering
that adored name
following its hallucinatory transformations
A sword cuts right through a beast already
or it’s a dove that falls bloody at my feet
turned into coral stone a support for the waste
of carnivorous birds

A repeated scream in each empty theater at the hour
     of the indescribable
spectacle
A thread of water dancing before the red velvet
     curtain
before the flames of the footlights

Disappeared the benches of the orchestra
I accumulate treasures of dead wood and vivid
     leaves of corrosive silver
No longer content with cheering by howling
a thousand mummified families make a squirrel’s
     step ignoble

Beloved decoration where I would see a fine rain
     balance itself in a quick race towards the ermine
of a fur jacket abandoned in the heat of a dawn fire
that was trying to get a king to hear its complaints
thus I slide the window wide open over empty clouds
demanding that the darkness inundate my face
that it erase the indelible ink
of the horror of sleep
across patios abandoned to the pale maniacal vegetation

In vain I ask fire for thirst
in vain I wound the walls
in the distance oblivion’s precarious curtains fall
exhausted
facing the landscape that twists the tempest


[Mexico City, December of 1942]




Translator’s note: Originally written in French. Translated from the Spanish version by Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, published in Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana actual, ed. Julio Ortega, México DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2002.




{ César Moro | Peru, 1903-1956 }

Llamado a los tres reinos / César Moro

Call to the Three Kingdoms

I speak to the three kingdoms
to the tiger above all
more susceptible to hearing me
to the filings to the cinders
to the wind displaced from any of the three kingdoms
for earth one would have to use a silt language
for water a suction pad language
for fire squeeze poetry into a lathe and break the atrocious
         skull of the churches

I speak to the deaf with swollen ears
to the dumb more imbecile than their impotent silence
I flee from the blind since they will not understand me
the entire drama occurs in the eye and far from the brain

I speak of a certain incomprehensible enchantment
of an unknown and irreducible habit
of certain dry tears
that swarm over man’s face
of the silence the great scream of birth turns out to be
of this death instinct that incites us
for us the best among mankind
each morning becomes tangible beneath the form of a
         bleeding Medusa at the height of the heart

I speak of my distant friends whose confused image
behind a curtain of waterfall clash
delights me like an inaccessible hope
beneath a diver’s bell
simply in the solitude of a forest clearing.




Le château de grisou (1943)




{ César Moro | Peru, 1903-1956 }

El fuego y la poesía / César Moro

Fire and Poetry

In the golden water the burning sun reflects
the hand of the zenith.

I

I love love
On Tuesday not Wednesday
I love the love of the disunited states
Under the noxious influence of Judaism on monastic life
Of the sugar henna ice shine or pocket birds
I love love with its bloody face with two immense doors open to the void
Love as it appeared in two hundred and fifty episodes over five years
Love from a broken economy
Like the most expansionist country
Over thousands of naked beings treated like beasts
In order to adopt those simple weapons of love
Where the crime spends the night and drinks clear water
Of the day’s warmest blood

II

I love the dense branched love
Savage just like a Medusa
Disaster love
Daily sphere in which total spring
Swings spilling blood
Love made of rain rings
Of transparent rocks
Of mountains that fly and disappear
And become miniscule pebbles
Love like a dagger stab
Like a shipwreck
The total loss of speech of breath
The kingdom of thick shadows
With bulging, murderous eyes
The very long saliva
The rage of being lost
The frenetic awakening in the middle of the night
Beneath the tempest that undresses us
And the distant flash transforming the trees
In lumber of hair that pronounces your name
Days and hours of eternal nakedness

III

I love the rage of losing you
Your absence on the horse of days
Your shadow and the idea of your shadow
That leans over a field of water
Your kestrel eyes in the hands of time
That undoes me and recreates you
Time that dawns leaving me more alone
When I emerge from my dream than an antedeluvian animal lost in the shadow of his days
Like a toothless beast chasing its prey
Like the kite over the sky evolving with clockwork precision
I see you in a loud jungle and throwing myself at you
with the fatality of a stick of dynamite
Rationing out your veins and drinking your blood
Fighting with the day lacerating dawn
Dislocating death’s body
And finally time is mine
And night reaches me
And the dream that annuls me devours you
And I can assimilate you like a ripe fruit
Like a stone on a sinking island




{ César Moro | Peru, 1903-1956 }

El mundo ilustrado / César Moro

The Illustrated World

Just like your nonexistent window
Like a hand shadow on a ghost instrument
Just like the veins and the intense circuit of your blood
With the same equality with the precious continuity that
ideally assures me of your existence
At a distance
At the distance
Despite the distance
With your forehead and your face
And your entire presence without closing your eyes
And the landscape born of your presence when the city
wasn’t, couldn’t help being the useless reflex of your
catastrophe presence
To better wet the bird feathers
This rain falling from high above
And it locks me alone inside you
Inside and far from you
Like a road getting lost in another continent




{ César Moro | Peru, 1903-1956 }

El agua en la noche / César Moro

Water in the Night

II

Infallible butterfly
Nocturnal light
A favorable exit for my insomnia
Honey of the day’s sour urn
Voluble and extinct oven
Dead under the sun
Shadow’s blemish
On the wall
Night’s crevice
With no star
You come to my home
Familiar ghost of silence
To open the new cycle
In the hard solitary kingdom


VII

I travel through marvelous storms
Proud of sinking into desperation
Since you smile while you crush my heart
I see the flame of your eyes
They shine elsewhere
The prodigious earth of stars
You laugh from your same laugh
From your strength surrounded by caresses
Overflowing with serious love


IX

To be or not to be
The glacial bitterness embellished in gold
The peal of a teardrop in full sunlight

Atrocious pain in lucidity
The fixed idea the fixed object
Shadow ivy mirror echo

To be man’s nocturnal aspect at the edge of old age
Maturity iridescent rotten
Morganatic
What doesn’t provide full rights
To health quaffed in a single drink in the cloudy materialist glass
To not be abandonment
Nor the metaphysical waiting thought’s colossal winter
To not be the one who arrives

To be stone blindness deafness
The cold of the abandoned place
Doors open to night

Footsteps disappear
Rain falls
One by one the stars close their immortal eyes
To the world’s night


X

Having to write to you until the end of my life
To illustrate the dead weight of days
I will live without you
Inebriated by the secret vibration
Irradiating in nature the sickly East of a black pearl
I depart ceaselessly at each pulse of blood to become a part of you
Memory’s fire grinding a life
The caress of slowness over the impending separation
I love you
Atrocious insomnia night made of lead
Of what dream heavier than distance
Should I demand an unfolding?

Illumination in the flight of your eyelids
Living fountain where I am amazed by the blessing
Flapping the pure air
Your obelisk shadow
And You at the end of the glass road

I would follow you in the storm
Until reaching breath




Translator’s note: Originally written in French. Translated from the Spanish version by Ricardo Silva Santisteban, published in Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana actual, ed. Julio Ortega, México DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2002.




{ César Moro | Peru, 1903-1956 }

Viaje hacia la noche / César Moro

Journey Toward Night

         It is my ultimate residence, from whence nothing returns
         Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita

Like a mother sustained by fluvial branches
Of fear and inceptive light
Like a skeletal horse
Radiating dusk beams
Behind the dense branching of trees and trees of anguish
The sun-filled path of ocean stars
The gleaming stock
Of data lost in the worthy night of the past
Like an eternal panting if you emerge into the night
As the wind settles wild boars go by
Hyenas sick of pillage
Split lengthwise, the spectacle displays
Bloody visages of lunar eclipse
The body in flames oscillates
Through time
Without changeable space
So the eternal is the unmovable
And all the rocks thrown
To the gales, to the four cardinal points
Return as solitary birds
Devouring lakes of ruined years
Unfathomable spider webs of collapsed and flammable time
Rusty cavities
In the pyramidal silence
Pale blinking splendor
To let me know I still live
Responding through each pore of my body
To the power of your name oh poetry

         Lima, the horrible, 24 of July or August of 1949




{ César Moro, Vida de poeta: Algunas cartas de César Moro, Caracas: Fondo Editorial Pequeña Venecia, 2000 }