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perpetual funerals,

      fantastic daggers were shattering.

      It’s raining … raining … The downpour condenses,

      reducing itself to funereal odors,

      the mood of ancient camphors

      that hold vigil tahuashando¹⁵ down the path

      with their ponchos of ice and no sombreros.

      [CE]

      ________________

AUTOCHTHONOUS TERCET

      I

      The laborer fist velvetizes

      and outlines itself as a cross on every lip.

      It’s feast day! The plow’s rhythm takes wing;

      and every cowbell is a bronze precentor.

      What’s crude is sharpened. Talk pouched …

      In indigenous veins gleams

      a yaraví¹⁶ of blood filtered

      through pupils into nostalgias of sun.

      Quenaing¹⁷ deep sighs, the Pallas,¹⁸

      as in rare century-old prints, enrosarize

      a symbol in their gyrations.

      On his throne the Apostle shines, then;

      and he is, amid incense, tapers, and songs,

      a modern sun-god for the peasant.

      II

      The sad Indian is living it up.

      The crowd heads toward the resplendent altar.

      The eye of twilight desists

      from watching the hamlet burned alive.

      The shepherdess wears wool and sandals,

      with pleats of candor in her finery;

      and in her humbleness of sad and heroic wool,

      her feral white heart is a tuft of flax.

      Amid the music, Bengal lights,

      an accordion sol-fas! A shopkeeper

      shouts to the wind: “Nobody can match that!”

      The floating sparks—lovely and charming—

      are wheats of audacious gold sown by

      the farmer in the skies and in the nebulae.

      III

      Daybreak. The chicha finally explodes

      into sobs, lust, fistfights;

      amid the odors of urine and pepper

      a wandering drunk traces a thousand scrawls.

      “Tomorrow when I go away …” a rural

      Romeo bewails, singing at times.

      Now there is early-riser soup for sale;

      and an aperitive sound of clinking plates.

      Three women go by … an urchin whistles … Distantly

      the river flows along drunkenly, singing and weeping

      prehistories of water, olden times.

      And as a caja from Tayanga¹⁹ sounds,

      as if initiating a blue huaino,²⁰ Dawn

      tucks up her saffron-colored calves.

      [CE]

      ________________

HUACO

      I am the blind corequenque

      who sees through the lens of a wound,

      and who is bound to the Globe

      as to a stupendous huaco spinning.

      I am the llama, whose hostile stupidity

      is only grasped when sheared by

      volutes of a bugle,

      volutes of a bugle glittering with disgust

      and bronzed with an old yaraví.

      I am the fledgling condor plucked

      by a Latin harquebus;

      and flush with humanity I float in the Andes

      like an everlasting Lazarus of light.

      I am Incan grace, gnawing at itself

      in golden coricanchas²¹ baptized

      with phosphates of error and hemlock.

      At times the shattered nerves of an extinct puma

      rear up in my stones.

      A ferment of Sun;

      year of darkness and the heart!

      [CE]

      ________________

DEAD IDYLL

      What would she be doing now, my sweet Andean Rita

      of rush and tawny berry;

      now when Byzantium asphyxiates me, and my blood

      dozes, like thin cognac, inside of me.

      Where would her hands, that showing contrition

      ironed in the afternoon whitenesses yet to come,

      be now, in this rain that deprives me of

      my desire to live.

      What has become of her flannel skirt; of her

      toil; of her walk;

      of her taste of homemade May rum.

      She must be at the door watching some cloudscape,

      and at length she’ll say, trembling: “Jesus … it’s so cold!”

      And on the roof tiles a wild bird will cry.

      [CE]

      ________________

AGAPE

      Today no one has come to inquire;

      nor have they asked me for anything this afternoon.

      I have not seen a single cemetery flower

      in such a happy procession of lights.

      Forgive me, Lord: how little I have died!

      On this afternoon everybody, everybody passes by

      without inquiring or asking me for anything.

      And I do not know what they forget and feels

      wrong in my hands, like something that is not mine.

      I have gone to the door,

      and feel like shouting at everybody:

      If you are missing something, here it is!

      Because in all the afternoons of this life,

      I do not know what doors they slam in a face,

      and my soul is seized by someone else’s thing.

      Today no one has come;

      and today I have died so little this afternoon!

      [CE]

      ________________

THE VOICE IN THE MIRROR

      So life goes, like a bizarre mirage.

      The blue rose that sheds light, giving the thistle its being!

      Together

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