Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
have snatched it
from anyone; when you gave it to us,
no, mama?
[CE]
XXV
Chess bishops upthrust to stick27
to lute, down deep, to napes,
to upright numerators’ undersides.
Bishops and burs from lupine piles.
As the lee of each unraveled
carabel snorts, without amerecanizing,28
blighting ploughtails in spasm slacken,
with the scanty pulse improperly prone
to blowing its nose on the back of its wrist.
And the sharpest sopranancy
gets tonsured, ensnared, and at length
imnazaled29 near icicles
of infinite pity.
Biggity haunches huff hard
to bear, pendent on musty breast plates
standards with their seven colors
under zero, from guano islands
to guano islands.
Hence the honey harvests in the wide open of bad
faith.
Hence the time of the rounds. Hence the man of the back
roads onward to future planes,
when innanimous gryphion only reports
blundered mute-due crusades.30
So then bishops come even to stick
to trapdoors and to rough drafts.
[JM]
XXVIII
I’ve had lunch alone now, and without any
mother, or may I have, or help yourself, or water,
or father who, over the eloquent offertory
of ears of corn, asks for his postponed
image, between the greater clasps of sound.
How could I have had lunch. How served myself
these things from such distant plates,
when my own home will have broken up,
when not even mother appears at my lips.
How could I have had a nothing lunch.
At the table of a good friend I’ve had lunch
with his father just arrived from the world,
with his white-haired aunts who speak
in dapple-gray tinkle of porcelain,
mumbling through all their widow alveoli;
and with generous place settings of lively tootlings,
because they’re in their own home. What a snap!
And the knives on this table
have hurt me all over my palate.
Viandry31 at such tables, where one tastes
someone else’s love instead of one’s own,
turns into earth the mouthful not offered by
MOTHER,
makes the hard degllusion32 a blow; the dessert,
bile; the coffee, funereal oil.
Now when my own home has broken up,
and the maternal help yourself does not leave the
tomb,
the kitchen in darkness, the misery of love.
[CE]
XXX
Burn of the second
in all of yearning’s tender carnage,
platter of vigrant33 chilies,
at two in the immoral afternoon.
Warrant of edges edge to edge.
Heady truth tapped alive, upon hooking up
our sexual antenna
to what we’re being unawares.
Dishwater of maximum ablution.
Voyaging crocks
that collide and spatter from fresh unanimous
shadow, the color, fraction, enduring life,
the eternal enduring life.
Don’t fret. Such is Death.
The sex blood of the Beloved, who all sweetnessed-up34
bemoans such lugging around so much
for such a ridiculous reason.
And the circuit
between our poor day and the big night,
at two in the immoral afternoon.
[JM]
XXXI
Hope between cotton bawls.35
Uniform husky arris
of magnificent spore woven threats
and with porter buttons inborn.
Are six rubbed out by sun?
Nativity. Shut up, fear.
Christian I hope, ever hope
kneeling down upon the circular stone
that on this chance’s hundred corners
is so vague where I appear.
And God overwhelmed subdues
our pulse, silent, grave,
and as father to his babe
barely,
but barely, half-opens up bloody cotton balls
and takes hold of hope between his fingers.
Lord, it’s I who want it …
And that’s enough!
[JM]
XXXVI
We struggle to thread ourselves through a needle’s eye,
face to face, hell-bent on winning.36
The fourth angle of the circle ammoniafies37 almost.
Female is continued the male, on the basis
of probable breasts, and precisely
on the basis of how much does not flower.
Are you that way, Venus de Milo?
You hardly act crippled, pullulating
enwombed in the plenary arms
of existence,
of this existence that neverthelessez38
perpetual imperfection.
Venus de Milo, whose cut-off, increate
arm swings round and tries to elbow
across greening stuttering pebbles,
ortive nautili, recently crawling
evens, immortal on the eves of.
Lassoer of imminences, lassoer