This maze made of confusion, a thousand casual lapses.
Damnation--of the flaccid grip.

   'I honour you in dread

Since your voice like a soft vapour laps me
and my eyes, offered to the eternal scythe,
dare for you to contemplate the coffin;
since to me your red sanctuary affords
a joy half chill, half cardinalate, before
the posthumous avalanche weeps upon the vane;
since the bold cervix of the ardent skeleton,
predestined to the brand of the funeral
walnut, has hurled for you defiance to Death;
I honour you in dread of a lost alcove,
necromantic, with your rigid face
ecstatic, on a shin, as on a pillow;
and since you are my blood's harmonious chosen,
Amada, and life's convulsions seem a bridge
above an abyss, on which we tread together,
my kisses scour you devoutly serried
over a sacrilegious cloak of skulls
as over an erotic domino.'

--Ramon Lopez Velarde (1888-1921), in: Octavio Paz's
anthology Mexican Poetry


   'Ants

To warm life passing singing with the grace
of a woman without wile or veil,
to unconquered beauty, enamouring, saving,
responds, amid the magic hour's elation,
a rancour of ants in my voracious veins.

The pit of silence and the swarm of sound,
the flour cloven like a double trophy
on fertile busts, the Hell of my belief,
the rattle of death and prelude to the nest,
chastise the ceaseless truant formication.

But soon my ants will deny me their embrace
and from my poor and diligent fingers fly
as a cold bagasse is forgotten on the sand;
and your mouth, cypher of erotic prowess,
your mouth that is my rubric, food, adornment,
your mouth that in its flaunting tongue vibrates
like a reprobate flame escaping from a kiln
into a throng of bitter howling gales
where the moon prowls intent to ravish you,
your mouth will smell of shroud and crushed grass,
of opiate and respond, wick and wax.

Before my ants abandon me, Amada,
let them journey the journey of your mouth
to gorge viatica of the sanguinary fruit
provoking me from Saracen oases.

Before your lips die for my sorrow give
them to me on the graveyard's critical threshold,
their bread and perfume, venom and cautery.'

--ibid

[RLV is my favorite Spanish-language poet.]

"I...did not stop to think whether the verses...would find a
reader. Nor have I ever considered whether they deserved
to find one." --Jeffers

"More common than the flarfer working a day job
in a marketing agency in Manhattan is the central
Asian nomad." --Silliman's Blog