Residence on Earth (New Directions Paperbook) (24 page)

Fuenteovejuna, Alpedrete,

Torrejón, Benaguacil,

Valverde de Júcar, Vallanca,

Hiendelaencina, Robledo de Chavela.

Miñogalindo, Ossa de Montiel,

Méntrida, Valdepeñas, Titaguas,

Almodóvar, Gestalgar, Valdemoro,

Almoradiel, Orgaz.

One morning in a cold month,

an agonizing month, stained by mud and smoke,

a month without knees, a sad month of siege and misfortune,

when through the wet windows of my house

the African jackals could be heard

howling with rifles and teeth covered with blood, then,

when we had no more hope than a dream of powder,

when we already thought

that the world was filled only with devouring monsters

and furies,

then, breaking the frost of the cold Madrid month,

in the fog

of the dawn

I saw with these eyes that I have, with this heart

that looks,

I saw arrive the clear, the masterful fighters

of the thin and hard and mellow and ardent stone brigade.

It was the anguished time when women

wore absence like a frightful coal,

and Spanish death, more acrid and sharper than other deaths,

filled fields up to then honored by wheat.

Through the streets the broken blood of man joined

the water that emerges from the ruined hearts of homes:

the bones of the shattered children, the heartrending

black-clad silence of the mothers, the eyes

forever shut of the defenseless,

were like sadness and loss, were like a spit-upon garden,

were faith and flower forever murdered.

Comrades,

then

I saw you,

and my eyes are even now filled with pride

because through the misty morning I saw you reach

the pure brow of Castile

silent and firm

like bells before dawn,

filled with solemnity and blue-eyed, come from far,

far away,

come from your corners, from your lost fatherlands,

from your dreams,

covered with burning gentleness and guns

to defend the Spanish city in which besieged liberty

could fall and die bitten by the beasts.

Brothers, from now on

let your pureness and your strength, your solemn story

be known by children and by men, by women and by old men,

let it reach all men without hope, let it go down to the mines

corroded by sulphuric air,

let it mount the inhuman stairways of the slave, let all the stars,

let all the flowers of Castile

and of the world

write your name and your bitter struggle

and your victory strong and earthen as a red oak.

Because you have revived with your sacrifice

lost faith, absent heart, trust in the earth,

and through your abundance, through your nobility, through

your dead,

as if through a valley of harsh bloody rocks,

flows an immense river with doves of steel and of hope.

Between the earth and the drowned platinum

of olive orchards and Spanish dead,

Jarama, pure dagger, you have resisted

the wave of the cruel.

There, from Madrid, came men

with hearts made golden by gunpowder,

like a loaf of ashes and resistance,

there they came.

Jarama, you were between iron and smoke

like a branch of fallen crystal,

like a long line of medals

for the victorious.

Neither caverns of burning substance,

nor angry explosive flights,

nor artillery of turbid darkness

controlled your waters.

The bloodthirsty drank

your waters, face up they drank water:

Spanish water and olive fields

filled them with oblivion.

For a second of water and time the river bed

of the blood of Moors and traitors

throbbed in your light like the fish

of a bitter fountain.

The bitter wheat of your people was

all bristling with metal and bones,

formidable and germinal like the noble

land that they defended.

Jarama, to speak of your regions

of splendor and dominion, my mouth is not

adequate, and my hand is pale:

there rest your dead.

There rest your mournful sky,

your flinty peace, your starry stream,

and the eternal eyes of your people

watch over your shores.

A bowl for the bishop, a crushed and bitter bowl,

a bowl with remnants of iron, with ashes, with tears,

a sunken bowl, with sobs and fallen walls,

a bowl for the bishop, a bowl of Almería

blood.

A bowl for the banker, a bowl with cheeks

of children from the happy South, a bowl

with explosions, with wild waters and ruins and fright,

a bowl with split axles and trampled heads,

a black bowl, a bowl of Almería blood.

Each morning, each turbid morning of your lives

you will have it steaming and burning at your tables:

you will push it aside a bit with your soft hands

so as not to see it, not to digest it so many times:

you will push it aside a bit between the bread and the grapes,

this bowl of silent blood

that will be there each morning, each

morning.

A bowl for the Colonel and the Colonel’s wife

at a garrison party, at each party,

above the oaths and the spittle, with the wine light of early

morning

so that you may see it trembling and cold upon the world.

Yes, a bowl for all of you, richmen here and there,

monstrous ambassadors, ministers, table companions,

ladies with cozy tea parties and chairs:

a bowl shattered, overflowing, dirty with the blood of the poor,

for each morning, for each week, forever and ever,

a bowl of Almería blood, facing you, forever.

Regions submerged

in interminable martyrdom, through the unending

silence, pulses

of bee and exterminated rock,

you lands that instead of wheat and clover

bring signs of dried blood and crime:

abundant Galicia, pure as rain,

made salty forever by tears:

Extremadura, on whose august shore

of sky and aluminum, black as a bullet

hole, betrayed and wounded and shattered:

Badajoz without memory, among her dead sons

she lies watching a sky that remembers:

Málaga plowed by death

and pursued among the cliffs

until the maddened mothers

beat upon the rock with their newborn sons.

Furor, flight of mourning

and death and anger,

until the tears and grief now gathered,

until the words and the fainting and the anger

are only a pile of bones in a road

and a stone buried by the dust.

It is so much, so many

tombs, so much martyrdom, so much

galloping of beasts in the star!

Nothing, not even victory

will erase the terrible hollow of the blood:

nothing, neither the sea, nor the passage

of sand and time, nor the geranium flaming

upon the grave.

Tied up, reeking, roped

to his betraying airplane, to his betrayals,

the betrayed betrayer burns.

Like phosphorus his kidneys burn

and his sinister betraying soldier’s

mouth melts in curses,

piloted through the eternal flames,

guided and burnt by airplanes,

burnt from betrayal to betrayal.

The turbid Mola mule is dragged

from cliff to eternal cliff

and as the shipwrecked man goes from wave to wave,

destroyed by brimstone and horn,

boiled in lime and gall and deceit,

already expected in hell,

the infernal mulatto goes, the Mola mule

definitively turbid and tender,

with flames on his tail and his rump.

Evil one, neither fire nor hot vinegar

in a nest of volcanic witches, nor devouring ice,

nor the putrid turtle that barking and weeping with the voice of a

dead woman scratches your belly

seeking a wedding ring and the toy of a slaughtered child,

will be for you anything but a dark demolished

door.

Indeed.

From one hell to another, what difference? In the
howling

of your legions, in the holy milk

of the mothers of Spain, in the milk and the bosoms trampled

along the roads, there is one more village, one more silence,

a broken door.

Here you are. Wretched eyelid, dung

of sinister sepulchral hens, heavy sputum, figure

of treason that blood will not erase. Who, who are you,

oh miserable leaf of salt, oh dog of the earth,

oh ill-born pallor of shadow?

The flame retreats without ash,

the salty thirst of hell, the circles

of grief turn pale.

Cursed one, may only humans

pursue you, within the absolute fire of things may

you not be consumed, not be lost

in the scale of time, may you not be pierced by the burning glass

or the fierce foam.

Alone, alone, for the tears

all gathered, for an eternity of dead hands

and rotted eyes, alone in a cave

of your hell, eating silent pus and blood

through a cursed and lonely eternity.

You do not deserve to sleep

even though it be with your eyes fastened with pins:

you have to be

awake, General, eternally awake

among the putrefaction of the new mothers,

machine-gunned in the autumn. All and all the sad children

cut to pieces,

rigid, they hang, awaiting in your hell

that day of cold festivity: your arrival.

Children blackened by explosions,

red fragments of brain, corridors filled

with gentle intestines, they all await you, all in the

very posture

of crossing the street, of kicking the ball,

of swallowing a fruit, of smiling, or being born.

Smiling. There are smiles

now demolished by blood

that wait with scattered exterminated teeth

and masks of muddled matter, hollow faces

of perpetual gunpowder, and the nameless

ghosts, the dark

hidden ones, those who never left

their beds of rubble. They all wait for you

to spend the night. They fill the corridors

like decayed seaweed.

They are ours, they were our

flesh, our health, our

bustling peace, our ocean

of air and lungs. Through

them the dry earth flowered. Now, beyond the earth,

turned into destroyed

substance, murdered matter, dead flour,

they await you in your hell.

Since acute terror or sorrow waste away,

neither terror nor sorrow await you. May you be alone

and accursed,

alone and awake among all the dead,

and let blood fall upon you like rain,

and let a dying river of severed eyes

slide and flow over you staring at you endlessly.

This that was created and tamed,

this that was moistened, used, seen,

lies—poor kerchief—among the waves

of earth and black brimstone.

Like bud or breast

they raise themselves to the sky, like the flower that rises

from the destroyed bone, so the shapes

of the world appeared. Oh eyelids,

oh columns, oh ladders.

Oh deep substances

annexed and pure: how long until you are bells!

how long until you are clocks! Aluminum

of blue proportions, cement

stuck to human dreams!

The dust gathers,

the gum, the mud, the objects grow

and the walls rise up

like arbors of dark human flesh.

Inside there in white, in copper,

in fire, in abandonment, the papers grew,

the abominable weeping, the prescriptions

taken at night to the drugstore while

someone with a fever,

the dry temple of the mind, the door

that man has built

never to open it.

Everything has gone and fallen

suddenly withered.

Wounded tools, nocturnal

cloths, dirty foam, urine just then

spilt, cheeks, glass, wool,

camphor, circles of thread and leather, all,

all through a wheel returned to dust,

to the disorganized dream of the metals,

all the perfume, all the fascination,

all united in nothing, all fallen

never to be born.

Celestial thirst, doves

with a waist of wheat: epochs

of pollen and branch: see how