My cigarette sparkles;
its light cleansed by gunpowder alerts.
And to its yellow wink
a little shepherd intones
the tamarind of his dead shadow.
The whole ramshackle house drowns in
an energetic blackness
the faded distinction of its whiteness.
A delicate odor of downpour lingers.
All the doors are very old,
and a sleepless piety of a thousand hollow eyes
sickens in their worm-eaten Havana brown.
I left them robust;
today spiderwebs have already woven into
the very heart of their wood,
clots of shadow smelling of neglect.
The day the woman by the road
saw me atrive, she shrieked
as if crying for joy, tremulous and sad,
while half-opening her two arms.
For in every fiber there dwells,
for the loving eye, a sleeping
bridal pearl, a hidden tear.
My anxious heart
whispers with I don’t know what recollection.
—Señora? …—Yes, señor; she died in the village;
I still see her wrapped in her shawl …
And the grandmotherly bitterness
of an outcast’s neurasthenic song
—oh defeated legendary muse!—
sharpens its melodious outpouring
under the dark night;
as if below, below,
in an open grave’s
muddy gravel eye,
celebrating perpetual funerals,
fantastic daggers were shattering.
It’s raining … raining … The downpour condenses,
reducing itself to funereal odors,
the mood of ancient camphors
that hold vigil tahuashando down the path
with their ponchos of ice and no sombreros.