Thursday, December 4, 2014

El candado cansado


       Encúrvase el dedo y ya tienes el espacio....

                                             Álvaro Urtecho


1.

They are strangling themselves
with strange love's black hands
to the vast amusement of a third man
in a third land with a third eye
and three ugly feet.

Who has a clue? Who has the key? They do.
It is in their right back pocket.

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.



2.

What is the space between two songs?

Does nothing have its reasons,
like all other reasons invented
after the fact?

Does the size of vacuity matter?

Does it have its vicinities and seasons and changes of face,
like the moon?

To half a glass eye it adds a crescent
and becomes gibbous, growing slowly
to eclipse.

Like a clipper ship around the horn
a new world is born freighting frost
to San Francisco and back in long round days
at sea.

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.

3.

Tell me, good people,
who is your creator but the devil,
whom you yourself invented and treasured
with all the secret pleasures of a sleeping
secret Egyptian,

whose long whiles lay stock still along the Nile
for four thousand years,

with ears like the jackal
and a nose like the three noses
of the platypus who smells
electromagnetism.

Fickle she was this river,
this shoelace through mountain waste,
fickle and fish-tasting but trickable
by immobile Pharaonic bluff.

Which while was that?
Which Nile—white or blue?

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.


4.

Your chaos
written in blood
is nothing new or huge
screwed tightly on the Canopic jar
of putative new anatomy and knowledge.

You are not the river.

You are not the barge.

You are not the driver.

You are not the sea—neither of you,

nor even the universal crocodile
shitting your tripes into the muddy flow
of rising brown water in flood.

You are the ersatz & exchangeable ant,
red and black, picayune and huge,
whose phases are dunce cap and corner,
honed and wired and mass-producing
nosegays distinct and fungible
on a bed of invisible roses.

Come the locust.
Come the groundhog.
Come the pubic lobster.
Come the bullfrog.
Come the giraffe of sunset.
Come lunatic laughter in silhouette.

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.


5.

The third ant and real.
The third authentic bee.
The third wolf and the third feral dog.
The third bear. The third hare. The third cat.
The third termite & the third acacia tree.

The beating of the Book of the Dead
door to door, floor to floor,
evangelizing islands and isthmuses,
sanitizing, harmonizing, simonizing
twilight into one more false dawn.

Let loose all your death.

Let loose all dolor.

Let loose the dull colors of your last curse
and shake the newborn earth
into morbidity.

No one will remember you.

No one will know your name.

No one will know you were here or there
for a year or a million or a day.

No one will resurrect you.

No one will reconstruct you.

You do not matter.

And as you pass hand in hand
through two performances in platinum
at the same and different time,
and the goose is cooked,

the band plays on.

E. A. Costa 4 December, 2014 Granada, Nicaragua







No comments: