Run Run Run

Saturday

written by: Antonio Gamoneda

translated by: Donald Wellman

My face simmers in the hands of the blind sculptor.
In the purity of quiet courtyards he thinks with sweetness about suicides; he is creating old age: yesterday and today are already the same in my heart.

* * *

The weeping animal licks the shadows of your mother; you remember another time: there was nothing inside the light; you only felt the strangeness of life. Later the knife grinder came and his snake penetrated your ears.

Now you are afraid and, suddenly, precision intoxicates you: the same invisible fistula resonates under your window: the knife grinder has arrived.

You hear the music of limits and you see the weeping animal approach.


* * *
Infection is larger than sadness; it licks tortured partitions, it penetrates the bedrooms of sweat and laudanum and later it shakes like a cold wing: it is the dampness of people who are dying.

The impure bird arrives slowly, comes to the cups full of shadow

and capillaries of ash spread over remnants of mercury and tears.

The lens reveals mendacity but its light comes from the abyss. In front of the scorched corneas hang threads of silence. Later

the disappearances depress the heart.


* * *
The animal that cries, the one in your soul that used to be yellow;

the animal that licks pale wounds,

that one is blind with compassion;

the one who sleeps in light and is miserable,

that one is dying in the lightning storm.

The woman whose heart is blue and who feeds you without rest,

that one is your mother inside her wrath;
the woman who does not forget and is naked in the silence,
that one was music to your eyes.

Vertigo in the stillness: corporal substances penetrate mirrors and doves burn. You describe judgments, tempests, and laments.

So is the light of old age, so
the appearance of pale wounds.
* * *
There’s a wall in front of my eyes.
In the thick air, there are invisible signs,
weeds whose threads penetrate the heart full of shadow,
lichen in the residue of love.

Incest and light. Consider the lens that comes before piety, consider the waters:
if I were able to cross nonexistence fountains of compassion would have opened

and there would be blind men whose big hands worked sweetly,
but cowardice is beautiful in my mother’s hair and on this wall silence is written.
Crying with a clear mind, concave truths:
“life values nothing / nothing values life.”

Remember this song before looking in my eyes;
look at my eyes the instant it snows.
* * *
Your name was only wind on the lips of the suicides.

Your face was irrigated by the rain: on the blind mask miserable furrows appeared and eyelids and a yellow mouth, but it continued raining and for an instant under the transparent sinews, your face materialized and your beauty was confused with the light, but it continued raining and it was lost like the earth spent by crying.

Your name and your face are indecipherable; maybe you have not existed,

still, you reached old age and make indecent gestures, also indecipherable.
* * *
I am naked in front of still water. I left my clothes in the silence of the final branches.

This was destiny:
to reach the edge and fear the quietness of the water.
* * *
The perfect animal is happy in the cloister and his tongue is melodious in lament.
He is happy at night; he penetrates yellow females who weep in the snow,
yellow females between the sewers and the tombs.

Peace in my eyes.

I see the whitewash of the uninhabited corridor (that old man who gently described his death).
On other days, large in another light, a torrent of lilies pours down the corridor (of these, some are white, their perfume unfamiliar),

the weeds multiply before the cantilevers (on other days, those summer days after rain on the dark figtrees, cloud of blue gnats hoarse in their transparent scriptures)

and transparent snakes flee (eggs laid in fertile latrines, high above the slowest, those who are dying under the nails of the perfect animal).

Here, in the ecclesiastic courtyards, I watched the flood of birds

and now it is Saturday in the snow.

Peace in the steady walls. There are notices about whirling monks, steeped in stupidity until meeting with God in the gaze of a lizard and in the scent of a poppy;

peace on the balcony of fear (that quietness split open by moaning): already disappearances occur and the heart is emptied.

Surely, the heart is empty at night in front of this courtyard

and the memory of other days, slow with substances that mixed rancor in sweetness (black in the mouth of lovers, black in the armpits of mothers), it stops

and God fell (ancient mask; not from that hollow of your heart but the one in front of your face).

Nothing is fleet in your memory but the eyes of the suicide, he who burned trees with his hands expert in poverty and rage:

nothing is true, the portents cross your hearing in vain, oh miserable one facing the snow.

Descend into the eternity of pale latrines until you feel silence and its purity confuses you,


you hear the bells and the hurricane of larks,

you see the face haplessly loved.


You have reached the big Saturday of life.

In the whiteness the perfect animal advances, avid in the quiet, with his yellow ember.

He stops his melodious crying and gently pisses.