II

I mean the great vulgarity. We ourselves,
are rather the ones who are passing. Time doesn't pass!
But it slips through our fingers, nowhere to hold it,
whether it be harsh or sweet, whether you blandish
or insult it or spit out your rancour
in its face. It is tough, time, it breathes
slowly and you edge towards it with delight
– you edge towards love, to the word you hold dear –
believing it is soft and ductile as wool,
you smile and hold out your warm hand
to offer it all you have in the world and you think:
"What a happy moment. Life is beautiful;
let us throw all the weepers and wailers into its shade
so their eternal lamenting won't poison
the pleasures of our every day!" And yet
you feel your pulses beating and each
beat is a barb that marks on you the edges
of the skin and the mind. My pen
has begun to ooze its grievance
and was breathing something that is already
a laid-out corpse, while others weep for it
or harshly inveigh against it because it leaves
them not a hair's breadth to move or a bed to die in.
And more than this, we are all the image
of time. In meshes of blue flesh
runs blood. Would you be able to stop it,
oh angry hands? It runs every day
through the same courses, bathing
the pebbles of long ago. Only when it stops
this crimson current, when there are no more
men in the world, will the black mouth
of chaos sing the triumph of the man
who will have learned how to strangle time. All at once
Telemos rises like a bull, his horns
made of light and passion and he sings to me
with that voice of his, of fired clay,
ceramic that was baked for graves.
"You want to make use of your blood, at times
and you tell yourself, 'I am still in time'. You would like
to melt yourself with love. Love is placing marks
in the stream and Ulysses is marking you already
with the red-hot stake. You are now shaping
the cry you will let loose when the pupil
of your eye is burned to the root. Then you will have to seek
the blind man's guide to lead to you in the dark."

B. 11 August 1962

(From Polifem (Polyphemus), 1981)

* * *

BROTHERHOODS

Freedom in its clarity, how it urged you on,
magnificent dregs that sustain and buck
up our people: dice that at dawn
fretful hands cast before luck.

The swarm with boldness has begun to drone
if you worked unjustly, you were unjustly struck
down but death's eternal freedom no one could lift
from you, the fate you could in no way duck.

And your freedom is still adrift
truly madness's congenital gift
that neither force nor blood could confine.

Rise up again, then, oh rock-hard mettle,
for, if this is what destiny would settle,
when they hang us we will choose the pine!

(From Illa (Island), 1973)

* * *

DEFEAT

For me to be born, who has counted on me?
– a thousand times questioned by others this role–
today this mystery does not console
but gives a bitter taste to the wee

scrap that like alms I might have been free
to enjoy as my discrete existence's dole.
Don't tell me that life is a goal,
a logical term, an enviable destiny

or, among the stones, a sparse rose …
If a draught of joy has not made me replete
drunk with the bubbles that farce enclose,

in my ear it whispers the truth discrete:
Death cannot explain itself, nor will not, it chose
and living itself is already defeat.

(From Illa (Island), 1973)

* * *

XIII

You have buried me, suspicion of forgetting
beneath the hard graveyard slab of stone
as if I were a figure in true likeness grown
of Lazarus dead. But within my breast fretting

a spark there waited the finger that letting
elusive putrefaction be shown,
will return to my flesh healing once known,
the spirit's eternal glory again begetting.

One spirit that is enough to clothe two
bodies that in measure are the same.
And in the likeness of the man who

great succour needing, who found help through
the white wagtail whose call to him came,
I, with a word of love, have again received life’s flame.

(From Presidi major (Heavy Sentence), 1974)

* * *

XIX

With so much power, love, you have absorbed me
that I am imprisoned on every side
and do not have a secret place to hide,
because of your law and your decree,

to do there what I will. Until reason and folly
unite and with their vital commands decide,
that you, carriage, must with rough rims ride
all my body ploughing. No wasp sting can be
so wounding with more raw pain
and no sun ever blinded me, Love, like you.
Before you I feel completely nude

and with such force can your power arraign
that my naked flesh bears the order through
that my soul shall come naked to your domain.

(From Presidi major (Heavy Sentence), 1974)

Translated from the Catalan by Julie Wark ©