C é s a r M o r o —

translated by J a k e S y e r s a k

Love Letter

I turn my thoughts to the nerve-wracked sea cucumbers surrounding us as the sun rose

when your feet warmer than nests

blazed in the night

with bioluminescent blue

I turn my thoughts to your body making its bed the sky and the crowning mountains

of one reality

with its valleys and its shadows

with mist and marble and waters reflecting every star above

in each eye

Was your come-hither smile not the ringing-out woods of my childhood

were you not the wellspring

the stone sought down the centuries to rest my head upon?

I think of your face

one motionless ember from which pours the Milky Way

along with that wide-reaching sorrow driving me crazier than the breathtaking glow of a beautiful

chandelier thrown overboard and into the sea

Unflinching when it comes to your memory the human voice is odious to me

forever the ivy-enlaced murmur of your words silos me in all-encompassing night

which glows your darkness with a blackness more blacked-out than the the night

Every blackness I can bring to mind is too weak to express the long ululation of blackness against

blackness passionately aglow

Never will I forget

But who speaks of forgetfulness

from within the prison where your not having been here leaves me

from within the solitude to which this poem abandons me

from within the exile whose every hour seeks me out

I won’t wake up anymore

I won’t resist the onslaught of overwhelming waves

from the blessed landscape you inhabit

Stranded outside under the nocturnal cold weather I wander

onto the placed-on-high plank from which one falls as soon as one steps foot

Frozen with fear beneath the terror of dream after dream blown by the wind

of years of daydreams

warned of who winds up dead

on the threshold of deserted castles

in the agreed-upon but nowhere to be found place and time

over the fertile paroxysmal plains

and sole purpose

I put all my know-how into deciphering

that name adored once upon a time

following on the heels of its hallucinatory transformations

Sometimes it happens that a sword passes straight through a wild animal

or a bloodsoaked dove falls at my feet

transforming into rock hard coral that sea-wrack stuff

left to carnivorous birds

A scream echoes through every theater at the hour of the indescribable

spectacle

A thread of water dancing voluptuously before the red velvet curtain

above the blazing footlights

Up in smoke go the orchestral benches

around me I amass the treasure of dead wood and lively leaves of corrosive gold

No longer content with simply applauding they yowl

a thousand mummified families trying to make a squirrel’s way of life out to be ignoble

Beloved scenery through which I come to see the drizzle of rain finding its sealegs undermined

quickly toward an ermine-

trimmed pelisse abandoned to the heat of dawning fire

requesting audience with the king to air grievances

so I throw open any and every window I can above the empty clouds

demanding the darkness inundate my face

that it erase the indelible ink

of sleep’s horror

across patios abandoned to the colorlessly maniacal vegetation

In vain I request thirst from the flames

in vain I wound these walls

out in the distance the precarious curtains of forgetfulness fall to the floor

exhausted

before the landscape twisted by the tempest

Envoi to the First Feathered Thing that Strove to Live

Unyawn your mouth

May awnings over the tranquil dais awash with light

The liquid curtain of suspicion

Leading to the comb-stormed keel of a ship

Dumbfounded underneath the eaves to lose perspective

To claw at the air

Vainly to leaf

Palaceless

Giantless and gardenless

Hold close to your heart the house the hearth the herd

The musics the orange the vast stretches of time

To be born for the leavings of flame

Laughing to leaf through the beings the long gone and others the lions

Extinguished to obstruct

Inquisitions into whether the landscape becomes a chickadee canon kick or cowlick

Mirror on Fire

While you and I we have seated ourselves on top of twilight’s cover

The green parrot

(The dark-skinned dark of the green pierrot

Like those cities over whom the sky

–Totally isolated also–

Idiosyncratically cloisters

With religions with new gods)

Lampposts beneath the moon

Face in luster

Long hallali of slenderness

Its body marbled dew

Skin of diamonds

All the way to the top of the ever-escalating steps

Night quivers to the pitch of the prow

Keeling reeling rigging

Let’s chain down the eyehooks the words that wound us

But follow the rising swells!

The woods extend from eye to eye

–O steps sow your homesteads

With precious webs–unthought-of

No outcries or dewy whispers

Or quavering voices or whinings or warblings will turn its back on it

It takes proximity for everything to slope

Toward the paroxysm of inclined eyes

At full volume come the bells

And demented Icarus veils his marine layer of a voice

His fin-like wings

So many swallows will have tailspun to their death around you O vessel!

Descending the abyss the clarity of coal’s burning roses

The heat of an adorable pocket-sized hell

The clear murders of rain-curtained mornings the evenings of snow

The guardian angels

Sound asleep

The rivers of goodness taking the isles in its tides

It was you I saw

And you and you only

In splendor teetering on the edge considering motionless it changes

And becomes hostile or dead or deaf

Where are your bonds the eternal gaze

Where the weights of your saliva distilling the balm

Where the navel of the world?

If I remember

That wasn’t the voice

Neither rage nor that smooth wall

Against the backdrop of the landscape lay a landscape

Wherein the lakes of your homeland meet

Those sensitive currents in the visage of the heart

But now everything is asleep in a bad dream

The iron words

The stones no longer have a warm heart

The night sprawls out under its jewels which link into a chain

Slate-colored sky

Every window encloses the mind

The unbearable odor

The imbecilic crackling of automatons

That today fill our lives

Words fragments bits and pieces

Where no thought burns

While never again

Will we cease to entertain the damned names

Always the same association of ideas

The same gear-switch-of-words

Will continue toying around

As far as the eye can see into human destiny

Where all the same we hold tight to somewhere

But if I close my eyes

The ferns assail the purest haze of the mirror

At that moment there is no escape but through your mouth

At that golden point where desire and nothingness intertwine

I hear the nostalgia

But by nothingness I mean the fault

Of wanting to confront desire

To quench the thirst

But is it possible to quench the thirst

For existence?

Within this twirling pierrot

I’ve come to my senses

No longer is there a heaven or a heavenly king

And what I once envisioned a vast array

Is simply the unity of death’s eye

Because I have existed since forever ago

.