1.

A thief, who’d stolen

wood from me one night,

the next day brought a ladder without rungs.

He said: A good piece of work,

the best, for you.

Have patience, I’ll bring you the rungs

separately, all

in due course, as many as you need.

But he did not come, and I

did not wait, I do not expect him back.

2.

Woodpiles in the rain.

He sniffs the air, comes and steals

what he can carry, for his ladder.

The wood is short and brittle, but he cobbles it together

he carves the rungs,

plies his knife, strips the bark, slaps it together

and stands his ladder straight up in the air.

It bears his weight.  He climbs

high up into the light,

flies toward his wings up yonder, out of sight.

He drew the key out of the door.

It melted when he threw it in the sun.

The house was empty, to the last creature.

Only a pair of stones lay naked here,

and wood enough to make a fire from.

Dew and ashes in the morning cold.

Along a path into the woods he stole.

The angel noticed him—and let him go.

The uncertainty grew greater.

One autumn evening

the rain too was no longer certain.  It hissed

in the wind from the Black Moor

and struck at the trees.  He said:

Do you hear the rain outside the window,

I love the rain.

And her answer: What does that mean

what do you mean by “rain”?

(It beat down on the roof.  In the nut trees.

It poured.  It was rain.)

Caution! Color! Freshly painted sky!

   It murmurs and whispers

from the turn in the weather—dripping wet, spraying, splashing.

Summer laughter of the rain in the eaves.

Cats and dogs. Deluge in the plane trees.

  Rainbow. Thunder. Specks of blue.

Wet kisses.

Clothes washed away.

This we know: when God injured his finger

he created the cherry out of a drop of blood.

You have it easier than he did: the cherries are ready

when you open your eyes in the green of June.

You can walk through the orchard at midday

and dwell in the open heaven between leaves.

The sun touches you with warm fingers

and the mole in his tunnel hears your cherry pit drop.

You spring from the tree with purple lips

and whoever sees you must kiss you.

You hear the rain at night.  It washes the cherries

and numbers the drops until morning.

I.

What is passed by, that’s what there is, desolate, silent.

And this thing, forever dragging iron chains over dull things

a train loaded with fire, eating iron, wearing iron, thinking iron.

II. 

Sitting up startled, I feel iron chains all around me.

The earth turns white, the moon is being interred

the funeral drags on forever.

The hurrying ones consumed by the monster

endure the endless frigid night that cinches inch by inch into flesh.

The earth jumps to welcome its damage

the light will be used up, everything that rumbles through the day is black.

III.

The moon happens to open its triangular eye

night churns on.

On the turning train, the caboose lights up first

the mail car stuffed full of letters from home flashes bone.

It’s said that bones are worthless, a state of mind is worth millions.

IV.

Ah this mind, there is nothing it likes

it can only like the boundless black depths behind the night sky.

The train is too flustered to pick a track

it grasps the gilded silver-inlaid earth

for fear it will be thrown off, or soar up and crash back down.

Centipedes slide about, landing legs in the air, haha, in the pale moonlit night.

V.

Under the shadow of ghosts, the train goes door to door knocking on glass

the white-cloaked train doesn’t let a single player off.

Who can quit this game,

refusals and fire and iron and the self that comes and goes all intertwine.

There isn’t much time.

Quartz burrows out from glass, quartz risks its life to make snow

the world is about to be exposed, all the trains are far away

and why do I still feel iron chains everywhere?

6.2011, Shenzhen

Ah that cold autumn

Your hands

couldn’t soak in cool water

your jacket

needed to be ironed night after night

and that thick white sweater

I knitted and knitted in vain

was finished like a miracle

into a time when you’d wear nothing else!

Ah that cold autumn

you wanted to dress like a gentleman.

Talking and laughing

we passed the days

laughing and talking, we confounded

people both friendly and mean

in front of those eyes

I held your hand

and thrust it into every

crevice with a conscience

I should have been born a giant bird

but now

I must draw in my wings

and become a nest

let all those unwilling to raise their heads

see me

let them see

the heaviness of the sky

let them undergo

a withering of the soul!

Ah that autumn so cold it was poignant

that unyielding and bitter

love we had

3.1985, Changchun

listening to the sound of water, having the premonition of winter, the insides of birds run deep /

while I smelled out the wind, the wet birds came and went in and I needed more heat in my body /

humans walking along the shore become the color that the water of night rolls up / night throws

away the wind, night rustles / the smell of the eyes of a beast that lies inside the grass aspirates / the

light peeled the reeds and its bones are cold / at dawn the cloud rises more transparent than a

scream / our nerves don’t flow like the speed of life inside a perfect square / after several years

passed on the grass / burning the moisture on the wind proved heavier than fire / and the grass

miscarried its heart / just then I quietly pick up the shadow of some wind that burnt / I will know it

is not the wind that leaves the scar in the grass but the fever inside myself / little by little / the color

of the coming snowstorm appears / hanging in every snowflake are flecks of wind / what mind

would put down one burnt foot on that body ? / the sky is split with birds like lines in the palm—

so what is the question then? / I can’t find a place to sleep and I witness the snow filling up the

ribcage of the wind sleeping in air / I hear the sound of cool water inside eyes, inside winter fruit

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You could say rain the same size as a cricket’s eye drops. Inside a vacant room now my soul is a ring tone ringing alone for a long time. That sound, for instance, a sun-shower, gentle rain falling in a colony several years back, getting feet stuck in the mud of the executioner’s square, maybe that sound is someone here vibrating on the floor from the phone I dropped, the chop chop hacking a man’s throat, or maybe that sound is listening to rain blur the whites of a man’s eyes that say motherfucker to the sky just before death strikes, or maybe it is a friend in Kazakhstan learning to ride a bike in the frozen waste, crying with scraped knees over collect calls ringing continuously, continually here— in any case, I am a season that does not exist in the world and my soul is time filling this empty room. Peering into the empty room, bloodshot raindrops like hanging eyeballs in the window. The window is time placing a moment into this life, but in this life a window is forever absent space. You could say that inside myself humankind has passed by. Inside a blood donation bus, Jesus wet with rain pulls up a poor man’s sleeves and reveals his thin wrists. Lying down and giving blood, he weeps. Jesus says, I didn’t refuse you. You shall be locked within me my whole life. The nurses nearby hide their long tails and say don’t cry. You are too thin. These days people’s veins are hard to stick. Throwing his umbrella in the road and bowing his head as he crosses the street, Jesus shivers in the rain. Dead men approach him and offer an umbrella. The flood will come. To the palace you cannot return. But I lost my star. Murmuring, both genders are the same as us. Trying to remember themselves, they offer their condolences. Receiving the rain, to their houses they clump their feet. They grab and lift the shoes they wore in life and cry. Mountain flowers blooming on the mountain melt on the tongue of a rabbit hatched from an egg. On the stone, the sky’s vigil falls. Jesus appears outside the window of my bedroom. His wet nails scratch the pane of glass. The blood of Christ pours down his face. I return. Casting life away, the blind man gone to the world of sound. Coming and going, these sentences are like Braille.

The Japanese think this is the month-without-gods.

They celebrate it this way. They don’t alliterate October

with gold falling from the fragile trees,

or with revolutions that changed history.

October, like a truce. Like an absence of everything

that exceeds limits. May it be for us 

liberation. Because now they don’t exhibit

the relentless naked gods of summer,

the too many gods, and so much remains

for the child of winter to be born, 

and our sight doesn’t reach any further, from this 

month of distances, month of far aways,

imperfect, attained, fortuitous. If only it would be

like this for us. Without the eight million

gods that hide in the city or in the forest,

the scales coincide with our statures.

Let us be carried away by our premonitions.

Let us write things with small letters.

Let us celebrate October for its absence of gods.

Let us enjoy its name because it is only a number

in a truncated series. And forgotten. It is October.

We have thirty days all to ourselves.

We should celebrate the fortunate translations.

Like the Précis de décomposition

by Cioran, turned into

Breviary of Putrefaction.

In those moments of maximum cultural insecurity

the art of translation extends

into the ultimate form of knowledge.

Now that the tower of history

suffers sieges that can be definitive,

we should appeal to the specialists

and to those who translate them

slowly and boldly

intuiting the essential meaning of the writing.

In order to understand everything

that has happened these years,

it’s enough to look at this book

by Arnaldo Momigliano 

which is about another time:

The Alien Wisdom, which someone 

translated beautifully into La sabiduría

de los bárbaros.

The oracle said

that in order to be happy

you should live in a house

raised above a place that is

neither inside nor

outside 

the city.

I’ve done my part.