Kristine Doll 

Translator

They made this city to confuse us. You enter following the thread of memory. Each walking his own thread. They are all different. Every exit different. The guides take us there. You go inside. You will never remember this place. There are letters and numbers. Sacred trees. Priestesses transformed into wild birds. Prophecies. We walk along with other people. I won’t know how to go back there either. We walk among cypresses. Voluptuous. We like the cypresses. And also the oaks. Put me in an oak, like the Roudoreda.* Even dead you can’t stop kidding around. But I don’t laugh. Even if you get angry. Blind Borges says that we are in a maze. I say one made out of Fog. It has a mute not a blind odor. And it knows how to transform facades. I won’t know my way back there. I tell you now while we are still together. While passing by effigies and angels. So you will know. In fact, one cannot go back anywhere. One always arrives a first time. Eternally one can only ever arrive once. You will stay here. If love were eternal, my voice wouldn’t be hidden behind my lips like a girl frightened by a stone-cold shock. From a blow to the heart. By a hard shock. Stone and wood. Wood gnawing at stone. The wet sound of cement, so moist, so absolutely sexual and humid. Penetrating. Terrifying like a rape. Pushing the rapist. Sweat beads falling on the non-existent belly, immobilizing me. Men's voices stop the crime. You are inside. I will not know my way back there. I toss rough balls of cypress up into the sky. Millions of unconnected words pass through my voice.

How much is zero multiplied by infinity? And love multiplied by zero? And Death divided by infinity? How much are you and I multiplied by you and me? How much is life plus one? How many of us are you minus me? Try as you might, if you open the door, you never open the door. It's the language that opens it for you. I just enter. There is no door. It's like a hand. That's it. There is no hand. It’s a word like a sign for streets and borders. I just enter. The finite instant of my infinite enters you. When you are not here. In this way of yours of not being here. In this infinite way of yours of not being here. You do not try. You're not here. Mathematicians have not yet been created. The sky is full of angels. The stomach rules. Forget about brains. Surely tomorrow it will snow. The day has no window.

While they are being taken to the slaughterhouse, the cows beg for their lives, licking the hands of the men who will sacrifice them.
  My mother, says the one with the long black apron, when she made me cakes she would put on an apron of flowers, and I became a little God of the home.
Mine, says the youngest, put on a blue one with lace while she cleaned my room and sang a song where I am her angel. You are my angel. You will always be my angel.
  Pretty cows with a tender look, says the one with the wolf's mouth and the soul of the moon, with an apron like this one but white, mine would spend the day cutting pieces of corpses behind a counter and I would see her sitting on a tall stool, so high that around my head flew six vultures and the eagle of the eternal snows. But ... why were you born here? In India you and your children would be sacred!
  Lovingly, they bring their heads closer to the aprons that will hold their blood minutes later. They lick them. Mothers and daughters lick them. They know. They cry. They do not want to go into the quiet night.
  Listen to us, they tell them along the long corridor that crosses the life of men and things and that is life. Listen to us, they tell them and they sing the poems that make the clouds weep and that return the rain to the meadows century after century. But not the hunger of the men who already hold the sharp weapons.

A large number of extinct animals and barges full of empty names are left over there by the tugboat of skies.  Its mission is to guide with the utmost care, to transfer, to accompany the maneuvering of entry and exit, the collision with the landless structure, the structure without sea, without air, the mission of berthing in the port of dark wings. Here is where it takes place. Here is where I see them: Mexican bear, Mexican bear, Chinese dolphin, Chinese dolphin, Haast’s eagle, Haast’s eagle, New Zealand owl, South African zebra, Blue antelope, Tasmanian tiger, Tasmanian tiger, Persian tiger, Balinese tiger, dodo bird, dodo bird, giant penguin, golden toad, Japanese wolf, Japanese wolf, Caribbean monk seal, Guatemalan loon, Guatemalan loon, King Island black emu, Thai deer, Thai deer, Vietnamese rhinoceros, Monarch of Guam bird, Monarch of Guam bird, leopard of Zanzibar, passenger pigeon, passenger pigeon, large white butterfly of Madeira, Round Island burrowing boa, wallaby of the deserts of Australia, Kakawahle bird, Kakawahle bird, graceful red-belly marmot, Queen of Sheba gazelle, Japanese sea lion, golden toad, golden toad, Wild Syrian ass, Caucasian bison, Caucasian bison, Steller sea cow, Atlas lion, Atlas lion, Guaa-obi parrot, Guaa-obi parrot. For a moment it seems to me that they still hunt, run, sing, swim, inhabit, rest, kill, gestate, sink. I see them here. Here is where it takes place. They pierce the visible and the invisible. They neither live nor die. They are neither one nor the other.

They no longer are. The ones drowned in the river, the jumpers out of windows, those who chose the bridges, or the wooden rafters, they made a discovery, they made an agreement, they made a wish, they drowned themselves there.

Spend your life eating the dead to become the dead.

To be a stomach.

The children who don’t finish being born, torn from the intestines, separated from the intestinal mouth that fed them, they are.

With a beak full of mud, the raven flies with a small worm in its mouth. Over a green and immense meadow, alongside a mountain, and a blue sky of immense blue. The worm trembles. The raven rises. The worm rises. The raven trembles. The worm says mother. The raven says earth. The worm says heaven. I say eyes. I say food and life. I say beauty.
He doesn’t anymore. They don’t anymore. They made an agreement. They are illuminated in blue.

I gave birth to an imbecile, to an innocent.
I made him inside of me.
I gave birth to him in a world full of snakes,
a world of stinking and smelly rats.
If I could, I would push him back up inside of me,
I would push him up like a tampon all the way up into my insides,
like flesh stuffing inside of a chicken.
I gave birth to him, yes, but:
Do I have to watch this innocent one suffer?
Do I have to see him mistreated by pigs?
Do I have to listen to how they call him crazy, those simpletons?
Do I have to run into the nauseating smiles of the insane who judge him?
This idiot who goes around with his heart in his hand
in a world full of savage beasts
is my son. Yes, my son.
Oh, sterile woman, she who has never given birth,
she who has never seen a monstrous angel emerge
from her flesh and veins!
She who will never feel the pain of seeing another
ruling over and stepping on humanity’s child!!!
I ask Her to understand me. He is an imbecile,
an innocent, a good person, perhaps a madman.
I am his mother, if anyone is to blame for this…
My flesh… what a revolution you have caused me…

                                 And I, more sensible about my destiny,
                                 keep both eyes in both hands
                                 and only see what I can touch.
                                 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

1. Animal Poem

Come.
I am blocked.
I cannot write anything.
I cannot think of anything.
I have a short circuit:
the cables dance in my head,
my molecules have burned out.
There is a storm of atoms,
there is a neural blast.
My body demands flesh,
your flesh, yours.
The animal food,
the stolen sensation,
the animal sensation.
I am blocked.
I have a short circuit.
I am a robot of my sex.
You can make the terminals work.
My caged desire
mauls me like a beast.
It wants to throw itself against you.
It wants your flesh, yours.
I am the robot of my desire.
None of my terminals works.
I have a short circuit.
I am blocked.
Come.

2. Vegetable poem

Now I am here.
I am a forest of obscene ivy.
I am a forest of shameless lianas,
I am the masochistic ripping of brambles.
I cross the dark spaces of the brain.
Mounted on the horse of loneliness,
on the rump of wild desires.
I am denseness drowning in excess.
Lost in the immensity of the tale of the flesh
I wait for you cynical wolf, morbid scene.
To kill you and to die in a lapse of time,
to murmur darkness as if it were fire,
to devour the limit, to kill the known.
Denseness drowning in excess.
You are the road that leads me without me.
You I am here.
Vegetable fantasy. Autumn of mystery.
Undress me.

3. Mineral poem

The moon is a stone, and it has no soul.
Sermons of Saint Vincent

I cannot believe that.
I cannot believe it.
Where and when. Flesh? I'm a stone.
Have I ever wanted you
with the strength of a vaginal river?
I am at sea. I am a stone at sea.
Does the sea remember the river?
The tides come. The moon is capricious.
The moon is a stone. Into the void.
I am the moon. I raise bodies.
Weightlessness. Is a body
a star that descends to death?
Death is full of moon.
Death is a drowning in the shade of water.
Your corpse ... I am a stone ...
I no longer want you, man.
I have swallowed a black hole.