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
