Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
the parenthesis.
Refuse, all of you, to set foot
on the double security of Harmony.
Truly refuse symmetry.
Intervene in the conflict
of points that contend
in the most rutty of jousts
for the leap through the needle’s eye!
So now I feel my little finger
in excess on my left. I see it and think
it shouldn’t be me, or at least that it’s
in a place where it shouldn’t be.
And it inspires me with rage and alarms me
and there is no way out of it, except by
imagining that today is Thursday.
Make way for the new odd number
potent with orphanhood!
[CE]
XXXVIII
This crystal waits to be sipped
in the rough by a future mouth
without teeth. Not toothless.
This crystal is bread yet to come.
It wounds when they force it
and no longer shows animal affection.
But if it gets excited, it could deposit honey
and become a sugar mold for nouns
which adjectivize in self-offerings.
Those who see it there a sad colorless
individual, could dispatch it for love,
through the past and at most into the future:
if it does not surrender any of its sides;
if it waits to be sipped in a gulp
and as transparence, by a future mou-
th at will no longer have teeth.
This crystal has passed from animal,
and now goes off to form lefts,
the new Minuses.
Just leave it alone.
[CE]
XLII
Wait, all of you. Now I’m going to tell you
everything. All of you wait this headache
may subsside. Wait.
Where have you left yourselves
that you’re never needed?
No one’s needed! Very good.
Rosa, entering from the top floor.
I feel like a child. And again rosa:
you don’t even know where I’m going.
Is the death star reeling?
Or are strange sewing machines
inside the left side.
All of you wait one moment more.
No one has seen us. Pure one
search for your waist.
Where have your eyes popped!
Enter reincarnated the parlors
of western crystal. Exact
music plays almost a pity.
I feel better. Without fever, and fervent.
Spring. Peru. I open my eyes.
Ave! Don’t leave. God, as if suspecting
some ebbless flow ay.
A facial shovelful, the curtain sweeps
nigh to the prompt boxes.
Acrisia. Tilia, go to bed.
[CE]
XLIV
This piano journeys within,
it journeys in merry leaps.
Then meditates in iron-plated repose,
nailed into ten horizons.
Onward it goes. Down into tunnels it stoops,
yonder, down into tunnels of pain,
down into vertebrae that naturally fugue.
Other times its tubes go,
lingering asias yellow from living,
enter eclipse,
and delouse do insectile nightmares,
now dead from thunder, the herald of geneses.
Dark piano, on whom do you spy
with your deafness that hears me,
with your muteness that deafens me?
Oh mysterious pulse.
[JM]
XLV
I lose contact with the sea
when the waters come to me.
Let us always depart. Let us savor
the stupendous song, the song expressed
by the lower lips of desire.
Oh prodigious maidenhood.
The saltless breeze passes.
In the distance I scent the pith
listening to the deep sounding, in search
of undertow keys.
And if in this way we bang head-on
into the absurd,
we’ll cover ourselves with the gold of having nothing,
and will hatch the yet unborn wing
of night, the sister
of this orphan wing of day,
that by dint of being one no longer is a wing.
[CE]
XLIX
Murmured in restlessness, I cross,
my long suit of feeling, the Mondays
of truth.
Nobody seeks or recognizes me,
and even I have forgotten
from whom I might be.
A certain wardrobe, only she, will know
us all in the white leaves
of certificates.
That wardrobe, she alone,
while returning from each faction,
of each candelabrum
blind from birth.
Nor do I come upon anyone, beneath
this humus that iridesends39 the Mondays
of reason;
and I no more than smile at each spike
of the gratings, in the mad search
for the known.
Good wardrobe, open up for me
your white leaves;
I want at least to recognize 1,
I want the fulcrum, I at least
want