I.
In the landscapes of Mansiche the twilight
fashions imperial nostalgias;
and the race takes shape in my word,
a star of blood on the surface of muscle.
The bell tower tolls … There is no one to open
the chapel … One could say that
a biblical opuscule died in the words of
this twilight’s Asiatic emotion.
A stone bench with three gourd pots, is an altarpiece
on which a chorus of lips have just raised
the Eucharist of golden chicha.
Beyond, smoke smelling of sleep and stable
rises on the wind from the farms,
as if’a firmament were being exhumed.
II.
Like a relief on a pre-Incan block,
the pensive old woman spins and spins;
in her Mama fingers the thin spindle
shears the gray wool of her old age.
A blind, unlit sun guards and mutilates
her sclerotic snowy eyes …!
Her mouth is scornful, and with a deceptive calm
her imperial weariness perhaps holds vigil.
There are meditating ficuses, routed
shaggy Incan troubadours,
the rancid pain of this idiotic cross,
in the shameful hour that now escapes,
and is a lake soldering crude mirrors
where shipwrecked Manco Capac weeps.
III.
Like old caciques the oxen walk
the road to Trujillo, meditating …
And in the iron of the evening, they feign kings
who wander dead domains sobbing.
Standing on the wall, I ponder the laws
happiness and anguish keep exchanging:
already in the oxen’s widowed pupils
dreams that have no when are rotting.
The village, as they pass, is dressed in
harsh gray, where a cow’s mooing
is oiled with dreams and huaca emotion.
And in the banquet of the blue iodized sky
an ancient exiled corequenque moans in
the chalice of a melancholy cattle-bell.
IV.
La Grama—gloomy, secluded, unadorned—
stifles I don’t know what unknown protest:
it resembles the exhausted soul of a poet,
withdrawn in an expression of defeat.
La Ramada has carved its silhouette,
a cadaverous cage, alone and broken,
where my sick heart calms itself in
a statuesque tedium of terra-cotta.
The song saltlessly arrives from the sea
fitted out in the farcical mask of a thug
who drools and staggers, hanged!
The fog weaves a bandage about the lilac hill
enwalled with milliary dreams,
like a gigantic huaco holding vigil.