Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
I am axling48—don’t you hear the plummet gasping?
—don’t you hear the reveilles champing?49
I am molding your love formula
for all the hollows of this ground.
Oh if only tacit volantes were available
for all the most distant ribbons,
for all the most diverse appointments.
There, there, immortal dead one. There, there.
Under the double arches of your blood, where
one can only pass on tiptoes, even my father
to go through there,
humblest50 himself until less than half a man,
until being the first child that you had.
There, there, immortal dead one.
In the colonnade of your bones
which not even sobs can topple,
and in whose side not even Destiny could intrude
even one of his fingers.
There, there, immortal dead one.
There, there.
[CE]
LXVIII
We’re at the fourteenth of July.
It’s five in the evening. It rains all throughout
some third corner of blotting paper.
And more it rains from below aye it does upward.
The hands two lagoons come forth
from ten at bottom,
of a murky Tuesday that for six days
has been frozen in lachrymals.
A week was beheaded
with the sharpest of drops; all’s been done
to make miserable swell
in great railingless bar. Now we are
okay, with this rain that cleanses
and pleases and graces us with subtlety.
We have at gross weight trudged, and, in sole
defiance,
our animal pureness whitened.
And we ask for eternal love,
for the absolute encounter,
for all that passes from here to there.
And we respond from where mine are not yours
from what an hour the coda, being carried on,
sustains and isn’t sustained. (Net.)
And it was black, hung in a corner,
without even uttering an iota, my paletot,
a
t
f
u
l
m
a
s
T51
[JM]
LXX
Everyone smiles at the nonchalance with which I sub-
merge52 to the bottom, cellular from foods aplenty and drinks ga-
lore.
Do suns get on bereft of viands? Or is there someone
who feeds them grain as if to birdies? Frankly,
I hardly know anything about this.
Oh stone, benefactory pillow at last. Let us the living
love the living, since it will for good dead things be
afterwards. So much must we love them
and pull them in, so much. Let us love the actuali-
ties, for we shan’t ever again be as we are.
For there aren’t interim Barrancos53 in essential
cemeteries.
The payload goes in the upsurge, beak first. The journey clouts
us in the core, with its dozen stairways, scal-
ed, in the horizontifying54 frustration of feet, in dread-
ed empty sandals.
And we shudder to step forth, for we know not whether
we knock into the pendulum, or already have crossed it.
[JM]
LXXI
Coils the sun does in your cool hand
and cautiously spills into your curiosity.
Quiet you. Nobody knows you’re in me
all throughout. Quiet you. Don’t breathe. Nobody
knows my succulent snack of unity:
legion of obscurities, Amazonians in tears.
Off go the wagons whippt55 through evening,
and between them mine, facing back, at the fatal
reins of your fingers.
Your hands and my hands reciprocal offer
poles on guard, practicing depressions,
and temples and sides.
You too be quiet, Oh future twilight, pull yourself
together to laugh inwardly, at this rut
of red pepper gamecocks,
blinged out with cupola
blades, with cerulean widow halves.
Rejoice, orphan; drink your cup of water
at the bodega on any corner whatsoever.
[JM]
LXXIII
Another ay has triumphed. The truth is there.
And whoever acts that way, won’t he know
how to train excellent dijitigrades
for the mouse Yes … No …?
Another ay has triumphed and against no one.
Oh exosmosis of water chemically pure.
Ah my southerns. Oh our divines.
I have the right then
to be green and happy and dangerous, and to be
the chisel, what the coarse colossal block fears;
to make a false step and to my laughter.
Absurdity, only you are pure.
Absurdity, only facing you does this ex-
cess sweat golden pleasure.
[CE]
LXXV
You are dead.
What a weird way of being dead.
Anybody would say you’re not. But, really, you be
Dead.
You voidly float behind that membrane
which tick-tocking from zenith to nadir
journeys from sunset to sunset,