Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
himself up,
and seated smears on the soothing salfe.21
[JM]
XIII
I think about your sex.
My heart simplified, I think about your sex,
before the ripe daughterloin22 of day.
I touch the bud of joy, it is in season.
And an ancient sentiment dies
degenerated into brains.
I think about your sex, furrow more prolific
and harmonious than the belly of the Shadow,
though Death conceives and bears
from God himself.
Oh Conscience,
I am thinking, yes, about the free beast
who takes pleasure where he wants, where he can.
Oh, scandal of the honey of twilights.
Oh mute thunder.
Rednuhtetum!
[CE]
XVII
This 2 distills in a single batch,
and together we’ll finish it off.
No one’d heard me. Striate urent
civil abracadabra.
The morning doesn’t touch like the first,
like the last stone ovulatable23
by force of secrecy. The barefoot morning.
The clay halfway
between gray matters, more and less.
Faces do not know of the face, nor of the
walk to the encounters.
And without a toward the exergue may nod.
The tip of fervor wanders.
June, you’re ours. June, and on your shoulders
I stand up to guffaw, drying
my meter and my pockets
on your 21 seasonal fingernails.
Good! Good!
[CE]
XVIII
Oh the four walls of the cell.
Ah the four whitening walls
that irrefutably face the same number.
Breeding ground of nerves, evil breach,
through its four corners how it snaps
apart daily shackled extremities.
Loving keeper of innumerable keys,
if you were here, if you could see
unto what hour these walls are four.
Against them we’d be with you, just the two,
more two than ever. And you wouldn’t even cry,
speak, liberator!
Ah the four walls of the cell.
Meanwhile as for those that hurt me, most
the two lengthy ones that tonight
have something of mothers who now
deceased each lead through bromined slides,24
a child by the hand.
And only will I keep my hold,
with my right hand, that makes do for both,
upraised, in search of a tertiary arm
that must pupilate, between my where and when,
this stunted adulthood of man.25
[JM]
XX
Flush with the beaten froth bulwarked
by ideal stone. Thus I barely
render 1 near 1 so as not to fall.
That mustachioed man. The sun,
his only wheel iron-rimmed, fifth and perfect,
and upwardly from it.
Clamor of crotch buttons
free,
clamor that reprehends A vertical subordinate.
Juridical drainage. Pleasant prank.
But I suffer. Hereabouts I suffer. Thereabouts I suffer.
And here I am doting, I am
one beautiful person, when
williamthesecondary man
toils and sweats happiness
in gushes, putting a shine on the shoe
of his little three-year-old girl.
Shaggy cocks his head and rubs one side.
The girl meanwhile sticks her forefinger
on her tongue which starts spelling
the tangles of tangles of the tangles,
and she daubs the other shoe, secretly,
with an itty bit of silyba and dirt,26
but only with,
an itty bi-
.t.
[JM]
XXIII
Estuous oven of those my sweet rolls
pure infantile innumerable yolk, mother.
Oh your four gorges, astoundingly
mislamented, mother: your beggars.
The two youngest sisters, Miguel who has died
and me still pulling
one braid for each letter in the primer.
In the room upstairs you handed out to us
in the morning, in the evening, from a dual stowage,
those delicious hosts of time, so
that now we’d have more than enough
clock husks in flexion of 24 hours
stopped on the dot.
Mother, and now! Now, in which alveolus
might remain, on what capillary sprout,
a certain crumb that today perplexed in my throat
doesn’t want to go down. Today when even
your pure bones might be flour
with nowhere to knead
—tender confectioner of love,
even in raw shade, even in the great molar
whose gum throbs on that lacteal dimple
which unseen builds and abounds—you saw it so often!
in closed hands newborn.
So the earth will hear in your silencing,
how they keep charging us all
rent on the world in which you leave us
and the cost of that interminable bread.
And they charge us for it, when, being only
children then, as you could see,
we