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
.