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

In this village

In every hut – a small hut –

– a single hotel room –

– a nesting box for one starling –

– a hive for one bee –

there live, one of each:

not only the old people whose families died long ago

or moved away into the wide world,

but also young ones – of different ages –

men and women, lassies and lads, and children.

In this village

in the morning – from every hut –

they drive out cows to graze –

cows with one horn,

one tail,

one leg,

one eye,

one teat.

In this village

a lonely man

comes out of a little hut –

knocking at his neighbors’ doors

to stack up a grivnya with someone

and buy one bottle of liquor

to drink together;

but he finds no one,

and returns home alone

to his hut –

a small hut,

and a little later another lonely man

leaves another hut

with the same purpose –

to meet someone –

but this man finds no one:

never, nowhere, no one does he ever meet.

(Epiphany: to find no one to drink with

is a symbol, by definition, of being lonely

and remaining lonely; unreal opportunity

of communication, problematic

for the dwellers of small huts – and a real opportunity

of which the author himself is aware.)

I ran into an old village neighbor

who told me about his pigeons

(he empathized with his pigeons).

(Epiphany:

a pigeon, by definition, is

“something which is in the middle”).

“Remember, I used to have a pigeonry,

and my girls wouldn’t let one of the pigeons alone –

they got it into their heads

to teach it homing.

To its leg, they would tie a flower

from the garden by the house,

and when the flowers wilted,

a spoon or a fork;

when they ran out of spoons or forks,

they would tie a nut or a screw

that were always scattered about in the yard

(my motor bike always needed repair!) -

and they would let the pigeon fly.

(Epiphany:

a flower, by definition,

is something “which is the most beautiful thing in the world”;

a spoon or a fork,

a nut or a screw is “something small”).

But the pigeon could not fly far with such a letter:

just over the valley

to the path on the opposite side,

and there on the path it would always sit down.

Did you, perchance, see that pigeon -

you often walked that path beyond the valley?”

“No, not once. Maybe

it managed to fly away,

having somehow undone

every new letter with its beak

before I appeared on the path –

although sometimes

a garden flower,

a spoon or a fork,

a screw or a nut

would catch my eye,

but not once did I connect these

to your orchard,

your pigeons,

your motor bike in eternal need of repair.”

“It all happened in the summer

when my younger girl came of age

and fancied you at once –

she would only think

of you,

of your walking the path beyond the valley.”

tongues in the tower

pound the bells to sound

wind lifts         everyone

rushes into entrances   doors

slam     along the sidewalk sandals

patter   rain chasing behind

her heart pounds

her wet dress itches

& the roses are soaked

hail

shatters

above the very linden

still

little by little    windows open—

cobblestones slick in silver scales

& children gobble up the nuts of ice

is done

I’m trapped

a hound hanging on my thigh

I throw my head back until my horns rest on my shoulders

and I trumpet

they slash my tendons

and jab a rifle in my ear…

He falls on his side, clinging to the wet twigs with his horns.

I can see his dim eye, a blade   of grass stuck on it.

A black stiffened apple, reflecting nothing.

They’ll bind the legs together, pass a pole through, and toss it on their shoulders.

the sad one, the inconstant one, the aggressive one, the one who died:

(my Tropic of Cancer and my Ring of Saturn): the polite one,

the funny one, the nutcase:

  I want all of them here, now, together, to eat me:

my slit wrists, my lurid tongue, my frail fingers, my ailing

liver: (and my heart, as per usual, in shards): (and my brain

already shriveled, and my dick long limp):

all the rest is yours

if a rest remains after so much sucking, and if you linger in the kitchen,

the last one, to clear me away:

the weary one, the nervous one, the superstitious one, the tender:

at 6:15 p.m. Vasko phones: you awake? he says: sure, I say: and

I’ve already talked to my wife: (so the telegram was a total waste):

(but it’s no matter, not to worry):

and I’ve already penned the second poem of the day

(today, June 3^rd):

well, says Vasko, this really is a lucky

week, then, for you: (this week: of Knaak-Poetry):

my father’s voice is recorded on a tape labeled “Venice ’66”:

(the flipside features a Mozart symphony):

the tape contains a series

of phone calls from that time: my three boys, my wife, various relatives

of my wife, and a couple of her friends got reeled in by that wiretap

(there’s even my mother-in-law ordering bottles of Lurisia from a woman

with a deli in Turin, an Emilian is my guess):

the electrifying clip (which electrified me

on Tuesday in a fit of unhappiness): (and was a typical trait of his):

(which determined many things for me and my life): (I’m quoting from memory)

is when he says, then, to my son:

when others are happy, I’m happy too:

No utility is that basic, not power and not water

and if the nighttime city blinks out its glow

we see so much the better in the dark. The eye can get used to anything.

The bus ride will go on for months

you’ll grow accustomed to sleeping in a seat, to bread and ham, to coffee,

to being discreet like a lake

not like the rain on this metal roof.

A little drool on the pillow

announcing “—slept here”

you’ll repeat constantly variable topics

like the weather and your opinion of this foreign country,

because you are against conspicuous beauty

—which looks there for the taking, like a dish:

Andrés washes his car on a private street

in Lima, Monterrey, or Santiago,

his wife is fair, blonde as a saber.—

The bus, on the other hand, is a country where everyone is passing through

a little sleep-deprived and beginning to smell

where no one makes love: not in the seats, not in the bathroom.

Andrés turns over in his mind something Miguel recently said:

―Your girlfriend has four friends

from her first job. Out of twenty-six it’s exactly those four

who have lawns.―

Brilliant like spit on frost.

Miguel says everything I am is prior to my birth,

that given my father’s salary, he could have predicted

all of the guests at this birthday party.

I stand on nothing, and even if I did, that wouldn’t change the people present here

who have been to Cuzco and Memphis with their parents but met

their wives in high school.

I didn’t find mine there but later, as a manager

so we’ve spent five years and not ten together at the movies.

He adds that none of the poor people I help will come to my wedding,

nor will those I arrange like bridge cards or sports figures.

Neither I nor anyone here has ever decided anything.

The cruelty with which he judges me is nameless

so I forget it. I have always been the same and preferable

to severe Miguel, who someday

will say―I’ve been everything, nothing

is worth it.

With the wounds of my fingers I paint

works that are bought at a good price

by those who left me bleeding.

Filipino, long white mustache

No one comes to the cemetery anymore, Marco

but you, who five years ago  

retired and lost a healthy son.

Now you sweep graves as a volunteer.

Three months without a period like three red traffic lights

She’s expecting a child like someone waiting for a bus

at five o’clock in the morning. A child

who will be trampled to death like Marco Antonio Vidal Parraguez,

a death we’ll learn of fifteen days too late.

Her body a receptacle for liquor and amniotic fluid,

because she’s sure she couldn’t be pregnant:

three months without a period like the three red traffic lights

that Marco ran before they struck down his anonymous face

living while life passed him by.

Forty-five years old, bald: thirty-five serving

this family that votes for the enemy and brings up                             

a son who wants to lay this future mother

who goes from alcohol to hard drugs and back

like a child on a swing.                                                                       

You had one, Marco, but you never spoke of that.

Two under par

A friend commits suicide back in Colombia

and in the plaza’s night my lover

is blessed by vagabond hands

with a box of wine. It floats across seas,

as death sails accompanied,

arrives in this room and won’t leave so easily.

I can’t make love among dead bodies:

Patricio Hernández, swimming teacher,

and Alejandro Galvis, the poet,                                               

are now a fistful of ashes,

like those from the cigarette she puts out

with me in the motels of Santiago.