DEVIL WITH A CANDLESTICK

Sometime while I talk I suddenly start laughing

uncontrollably because I died at twelve years of age.

I remember details, the funeral service, father was

drinking a lot, mother was crying, my older brother

           had gone to the movies

and I, wretched in my coffin, was thinking the evening

           family meeting

and the daring position they had found me with my

           cousin.

For this, I’m saying to you, it’d be perfect if one,

during a night, was able to lift all forgetfulness off

the poor hats and survived eating gauzes in old train

stations only to make an armchair for the leftover apples

or to cry so much that the grandfather’s clock would

            ring again

and tell to all our friends that all who don’t remember

eternity they’ve truly lost it.

Now, the hanged people go up riding the elevator,

           no one notices them,

the old woman is fishing in her lentils for all the old

          drowned men and sometime a delayed one,

at night, sees our titles written on the skin

of the killed dog.

However, Pilot, upon seeing that it was of no use and

everything was just noise, he stopped the ceremony;

they say that during the same night the parish women

          gave birth to small wax semblances

and father, once merchant, after he lost all we had, stood

          outside the stores and

one night I saw him stooped over the garbage “father what

are you doing there?”

“I’m looking for that old cigar”, he said.

Next morning we put him in the Asylum, with a box

of cigars that I managed to buy with some borrowed

            money.

Since then I know a lot about parent killers. And I

            gave up smoking.

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Dead End

In the fall we heard horns of the ancient hunters
blare from under the arches The dowser
sat by the door
In front of Government House they burned kites Farther on
the statue was alone naked completely shivering on its pedestal
(the one that had endured so much to become a statue)
now totally forgotten secretly contemplated in the rock
a new amazing straddle that would draw
the hunters’ attention the butcher’s baker’s widow’s
disproving what he’d dreamed of the most: his unblemished
his glorified his made-of-marble comfortably crucified
motionlessness

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New Safeguards

Silent mornings as the leaves fall, a pause

under the perforated domes of trees,

deep pause of the roots in the soil. Two old men

sit on the bench; they stare at their hands. A woman

gathers fruit from the low branches, the other

woman disappears on the treetop. Later on

the sun strikes its pan on the garden railings;

then the women come down from the trees,

shake off their dresses, get inside the houses,

tidy the rooms, make the beds;

they hold the big despotic guarding brooms

which remind us that we have to always protect

ourselves from something.   

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