11, and: 12

Abstract

11, and: 12 Elsa Cross 11 I dreamed the Sibyl's closed mouth.A brown veil fell over her eyes,and the purple mouthopened an uncertain woundamong her final wordsand what someone perhaps would collectfrom those lips closed in the darkbeneath the walls of Cumas.Green-black Cumas. Or was it your mouthwith its misery of Fallen Angel?I followed the line of your browtoward a nose of precise proportions.And between the delicate trace of the nasal cavitiesand the strong line of the chin,the Alexandrian mouth. Mais que ta bouche est belle en ce muet blasphème… Or was your mouth seen from a secret world,which closed a parenthesis—or did it open it?I don't know what portions of life remained within—or outside?—that flow that advanced trippingover its abundance,plunging against itself,snatching us away—Like the day we emerged exultantfrom Père Lachaisewringing water from our clothes and hair.It fell in torrentsuntil we found an abandoned tomb.It fell upon those ashen homes,upon our ashen heads,(oh Sulamith),destroying the flower that we had left [End Page 101] on the tomb of Nerval.It fell in direct answer, with its bolts of lightning,to what we had spoken about the drought—drought of the spirit.We wondered who it might have lodged,that chapel-like tomb,full of dead leaves,which welcomed us as guests without reservations.Other poets crossed those rainy afternoonsfrom the portico of Saint-Merry to Place Dauphine.We heard the phrasing of the final droplets,although the torrent seemed to hide itselfbeneath the rocks,opening cracks into the underworld.With the gesture of the missing eyesand the face lost behind the veil,the Sibyl indicated another dark interval. translated from the original Spanish by Lawrence Schimel [End Page 102] 12 Endless journeys.We crossed an open sea,an ocean in the limits of our own mind,passing its boundariestoward unknown pulsations. Journeys without leaving the coast,as if we skirted just a cup of coffee,reading in the patterns of its sedimentthe leaps, the exploits—which barely took a spin around the block.We were like that anodyne steleof the aimless knight,raising his weapons and bannerson the edge of the broken stone.What did he fight against? A dragon? Better than against insidious routines,endlessly beating waveseroding us;domestic sagasconcealing the sour taste of uselessness,of fatality,of the anti-adventure. Something also fell upon that orderthat asphyxiated things in their fixed places,and overcame one after anotherthe walls that confined the worldin that suspicious clarity.Only a tinkling, a tiny crunch,and the rupture spread annihilatingour own understandingwhen it found solace in its precise responses. [End Page 103] The shadowiest of watersthat a fortuitous lightning bolt barely illuminated.Strangers to ourselveswe saw those remainswithout recognizing our workmanship—empty carapaces,jellyfishes.An occasional star. It is not clear, not even after reviewingall the allegories of Bomarzowhat force spurred us to carry to the limit(the limit of what?)that fiction of projecting a serpent on a rope.And when we wanted to recognize the ropefor what it was, the serpent bit.What pushed us to conceal the most obvious,disguising it as that in which we forgeda perfect evasion,until the limits of the illusorynarrowed just the same,and those fields where we could wanderwore away like clothes and shoes,like faces do. If the power of the limitsseemed a wire fence,we left behind chunks of flesh in crossing them,risking everything,like the Madman on the edge of the abyss.If we survived that leapit was to remain like empty clouds,with nothing to hold us,or free as the parrotwho circled his cage from the outsidelooking through its bars. translated from the original Spanish by Lawrence Schimel [End Page 104] Copyright © 2017 Pleiades and Pleiades Press