BARBAROUS GARDEN

I

Watch out for time,
old lord of falconry,
how he gathers and hoards the surplus flesh
with which he must fuel the days
that death preserves and fixes,
with what force he hurls to the skies
the magic object of love.

Like the palpitating of the primary cause.
In the nakedness of all that has no name.

The movement always the same:
he to possess, you to be possessed.


II

We shall say love.
And in the blind
word with which the shadow names us
we shall sketch the bodies' dreaming.

Flesh transfigured.
Bare.
Truly the light that casts down
the flash of fire and fever
into the dying man’s devastated eyes.
Not knowing where love begins
and where the blast of madness ends.


III

Let the light of dawn reach
the place where all space is aflame.
There you will dwell, in the barbarous garden,
eye and damp truth of its centre.
Like this animal breath that seeks
the consummation of its cry in silence.

(From Jardi bàrbar (Barbarous Garden), 1981)

* * *

DIVAN FIRES

Her saliva quenches
the fiercest of fires

From her footsteps bud
pebbles of gold

*

Blood
(burin ink)

transparency of flesh open
to the tattoo

*

Closer to love

undivided
the orbit that encloses flesh’s
tubular fire

nipple of fear and the abyss

closer to you
the tightrope walker’s latitude

*

Towards the sky’s
death

Towards the sea’s
ashes
and
the blue
of my sextant

Towards you
wrongness of the time
that is to come

(From Divan, 1982)

* * *

REASONS OF CHANCE

I

beneath the corrupt belly of the sky
clear realms of elevation

passing clouds

the first lighting the madness
the second is the hanged men’s laughter
like the swine’s acid belch the third

of the fourth the books do not speak

it bears my bleeding head
upon a silver tray


II

and with a river welling from the depths of his eyes he said:
becoming water is death for souls
as for water it is death to become earth

from the earth is born water and from water the soul

(From Raó d'atzar (Rightness of Chance), 1990)

* * *

AFTER THE MUTENESS

You are mute now.

The sky
is a mouthful
of hot milk

where my weeping
finds again
God's heartburn,
love and its
silence.

(From Llibre de la frontera (Book of the Frontier), 2000)

* * *

HEARTBEAT

Night sobs
at the turning of loss.

You, my heartbeat
always disconcerted.
You, the tooth that tears
the cry and surplus flesh
that no one wants.
You, sure happiness
of my secret
isle adrift.

Life clings
to the world's great lantern.

There only shines the leaden
light of a tear,
clotted and white,
sour as the milk
of the severed night.

When You Leave

(De Llibre de la frontera (Book of the Frontier), 2000)

* * *

WHEN YOU LEAVE

When you leave,
and the salt of your bones
is effaced like the clouds,

shadow and air
will cover the wound
with dewdrops.

And the lineage of pain
will return
to ancient music,

numb waters
where time and yellow fish
of melancholy
go to spawn.

(De Llibre de la frontera (Book of the Frontier), 2000)

* * *

FLIGHT OF ASHES

Tear or sperm

the solitary light
where burns
the lost isle

of maps

(De Llibre de la frontera (Book of the Frontier), 2000)

* * *

ZAYNAB BINT YUSUF (Lleida, 994 – 1072)

The Calm of Love is Fatigue
(after a verse by Ibn al-Farid)

If some time my tongue
drops dead weary
it will be just to call you.

If you call me
the warm sounding board of your breath
will seal with mine your mouth.

It is late for you to dare to contradict me.
The greyhound is barking
and the calm of love is fatigue.

(From Llibre de la frontera (Book of the Frontier), 2000)

* * *

Jemmaa El-Fna

Her terrace was the
sand
And the palms and the twilight
WALLACE STEVENS

Here reigns Fitzcarraldo’s dream.

Marrakesh:
over seaweed, the dune.

Like a ship beached in the middle of the desert.
Like an abyss opening to the threshold
of silence.
What hour is this?
What face folds together the sky and the drift
of the sun?
The voice of a nameless bird?

Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald and all the dream
of red fever, the rubber tree
or the palm where the proud beauty
of Enrico Caruso resounds.
Forest or desert,
the final mountain. Here, the sun,
sleepless, inhales its air and is soothed.
It is the refuge that originates the end,
barque of phosphor
on the palmy beach.

Red are time and the clay of the walls.

Dented are all the boats, the journeys
are yellow like the chalk pits along the way,
roots reaching down to deeper holes.
Do not look back.
Be silent and sing
well inside, feel around all the rustiness of the soul.
Because this is the other land,
the other
square that is also yours, the land
of brambles that casts its shadow over the fire
and is not burned.
In the dark eye of the water bearer
beats the dune, fear and the hunger of every day.
In the eye of the snake, cold as mercury,
the unattainable challenging with its tongue
sunk in the distant spiral of death.

Stop.
Memory here finds no ferret
to rummage in the entrails of its lair.
The ferret is dead and memory knows.
It all hangs from the tree that was planted
by life.
In vain you are lost, you walk,
tempt the tightrope of nothingness.
In vain, your tongue is unmasted
and your palate weighty as a stone.
Beneath the voice thirst grows and you are unaware.

Clear, without respite, the dance explodes
in the core of the square.
Time melts.
Beneath small gaslights the orange
arbour thickens the bitter-sweet smoke
of afternoon.
Bodies sliding,
and sliding
are music and words amid the decaying teeth
of the story tamer.
And all at once
the sky turns, spinning top in the middle of the void,
night that repairs the west and the rocking
of seed in the market caves.
And all at once, when night falls and all is swept away,
the blind man says to you:
"You have a blue stain in your eyes".

Then, only then, in a landscape that is stock-still,
immobile, your heart cleaves in memory
like a pomegranate.
And everything moves.
Even this boat beached in the middle
of the desert moves.
Go aboard.
You will find nothing
strange.
Here reigns Fitzcarraldo’s dream.

(From Enlloc (Nowhere), 2007)

Translated from the Catalan by Julie Wark ©