Dream of Man

In honor of Cinco de Mayo, we present this work by one of modern Mexico’s most heartfelt poets.

for Efrain Huerta

You run through the night like a blind fountain,
Like a rich vein of sleeping music.
Your skin—simple forest of touch and dew—
Is the clear reef that limits your dream,
The place where the blood of tumultuous crests
Is met softly by the waiting shore.
—That lovely blood of yours, high and resplendent,
Wearing its necklace of music and sound
Through the hoisted rosebush of your veins.
Singing in the thirsty caverns of your pulse
Its elastic and burning score—.

In you, sleeping man, the world goes breathing,
The dawn is readied, and roses are invented.
Your children are raised up, imminent and beautiful.
They shine beneath your flesh, which asleep,
Is like a great transparent silence.
If you could see yourself on the summit of your dream…
You are not yourself certainly. You are more: a mirror
Of your deepest life, of the great hidden life
Which blind and powerful carries you
In your smallest gestures without anyone seeing it,
In the things you do when walking down the street
With your cruel suit and your eyes open.

Lost among resounding arrows of daylight
You are only a slight seed in the nothingness,
A weak despairing light
Which shines a moment
Between two infinite solitudes and runs toward death.
You feel how collapse already works in your bones.
Installing its irremediable darkness.
Behind the two gloomy vaults of your eyes.
You are always taking leave
Of the fleeting wonder of your flesh,
Looking at its devoured beauty,
Knowing your death grows and grows
Inside you, like an enclosed garden,
Like a dark apple, hanging,
From the tragic and beautiful
Branches of your veins.
And so you go, alone, alone, despairingly abandoned,
Like an infinite widower of your own body.

But when asleep you open like a rose
That is going to die, but that carries within,
In its cloister of active and blind love,
A sweet galaxy of beauty,
A close daughter of its perfume
Which at the same time its mother dies
Repeats her in color and architecture.
In dream your flesh disembarks
As upon an invulnerable continent.
There you can watch those unknown faces
Those that nightly model themselves in you,
That construct their dance and beauty,
The future column of their voices,
The desolate tower of their tears
And the loving snow of their teeth.

What eternity, what mysterious force
Inhabits you when you sleep,
While you are a quiet island
Lost in the ocean of your bed,
And in which musics and bonfires grow,
The infinite fingers of grass
And noisy armies of children
That demand your love and their disaster.

You are what declines, but also the eternal:
The seed in its place, separating itself,
The mystic darkness of the blood.
And there you are, victorious and defeated,
Burned by oils of mystery,
Possessed, undone, carried
By innumerable and future feet,
Your forehead crowned by dark angels,
Your hero’s shoulders wasted on the world
And your body filled with love and moans.

City: Bolshevik Super-Poem in Five Cantos

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 120th birthday.

To the workers of Mexico

Here’s my brutal
and multispirited
poem
to the new city.

O city all tense
with cables and with efforts,
all resounding
with motors and with wings.

Simultaneous explosion
of new theories,
a bit further
On the spatial plane
from Whitman and from Turner
and a bit closer
to Maples Arce.

The lungs of Russia
blow the wind
of social revolution toward us.
Literary zipper-robbers
will understand nothing
of this new sweaty
beauty of the century,
and the ripe
moons
that fell,
are this putrefaction
that reaches us
from intellectual sewage pipes.
Here’s my poem:
O city strong
and manifold,
made all of iron and of steel!

Docks. Inner harbors.
Cranes.
And the sexual fever
of industrial plants.
Metropolis:
Bodyguards of trams
that traverse the subversivist streets.
Window displays accost sidewalks,
and the sun, it sacks the avenues.
On the fringes of the tariffed
days of telephone posts
momentary landscapes file
through systems of elevator tubes.

Suddenly,
O the green
flash of her eyes!

Beneath the ingenuous shutters of the hour
pass red battalions.
The cannibal romanticism of Yankee music
has gone making its nests in the masts.
O international city!
Toward what remote meridian
cut that ocean liner?
I feel that everything moves away.

Aged dusks
float among the masonry of the scene.
Spectral trains that travel
toward far
away, panting with civilizations.

The upset multitude
sloshes musically in the streets.

And now, the bourgeois thieves, they will lie down to tremble
for the fortunes
that robbed the town,
but someone concealed beneath their dreams
the spiritual music staff of the explosive.

Here’s my poem:
Pennants of hurrahs into the wind,
inflamed heads of hair
and captive mornings in eyes.

O musical
city
all made of mechanical rhythms!

Tomorrow, perhaps,
only the vivid light of my verses
will illuminate the humiliated horizons.

This new profoundness of the scene
is a projection toward interior mirages.

The resounding crowd
today overruns the communal plazas
and the triumphal hurrahs
of obregonismo
reverberate from the façades to the sun.

O romantic girl
flare-up of gold!

Maybe between my hands
only living moments remained.
Landscapes dressed in yellow
fell asleep behind the windowpanes,
and the city, rapt,
has remained trembling in the rigging.
Applauses are that barrier.

—Oh God!
—Never fear, it’s the romantic wave of the multitudes.
Afterward, over the overflows of silence,
the Tarahumara night will go expanding.
Extinguish your shop windows.
Within the machinery of insomnia,
lust, are millions of eyes
that smear themselves on flesh.

A steel bird
has emprowed its aim toward a star
The port:
inflamed distances,
smoke of industrial plants.
Over clotheslines of music
her remembrance suns itself.
A transatlantic farewell leapt from the gunwale.

Motors sing
over the dead panorama.

III

The afternoon, riddled with windows,
floats on the wires of the telephone,
and between the
inverse crossings of the hour
the farewells of the machines hang. One morning his

wonderful youth
exploded
between my fingers,
and in the empty water
of the mirrors,
the forgotten faces were shipwrecked.

Oh the poor trade union city
scattered
with cheers and screams!

The workers
are red
and yellows.

There is a flourishing of pistols
after the springboard of the speeches,
and while the lungs
of the wind
are suppurated,
lost in the dark corridors of the music
some white bride leaves off.

Among copses of silence
darkness licks the blood of dusk.
Fallen stars,
they are dead birds
in the dreamless water
of the mirror.

And the resounding
artilleries of the Atlantic
waned,
finally,
in the distance.

Over the rigging of autumn,
a nocturnal wind blows:
it is the wind of Russia,
of the great tragedies,
and the garden,
yellow,
founders in shadow.
Her recollection, sudden,
it crackles in muted interiors.

Her golden words
sift in my memory.

Rivers of blue shirts
overflow the floodgates of industrial plants,
and agitator trees
gesticulate their discourses on the sidewalk.
The strikers fling
insults and blows with stones,
and life, it is a tumultuous
conversion to the left.

On the edges of the pillow,
night, it is a precipice;
and insomnia,
it has remained rummaging in my brain.

From whom are those voices
that float in shadow?

And these trains that howl
to devastated horizons.

The soldiers
will spend this night in the inferno.

My God!
And from all this disaster
only a few white
pieces
of her recollection,
they have kept me within her hands.

The savage hordes of the night
lie down over the frightened city.

The bay,
flowering
with masts and moons,
spills
over the ingenuous
music score of her hands,
and the distant scream
of a steamboat,
toward the Nordic seas.

Goodbye
to the shipwrecked continent!

Between the wires of her name
remain feathers of birds.

Poor Celia Maria Dolores;
the scene is inside us.
Beneath hatchet blows of silence
iron architectures are devastated.
There are waves of blood and storm clouds of hatred.

Desolation.

The marijuana discourses
of legislators
splattered her remembrance with droppings,
but,
her tenderness has fallen headlong
on the multitudes of my soul.

Ocotlán
there, far away.
Voices.

Impacts peck about
trenches.

All night lust stoned
balconies under cover of a virginity.

Shrapnel
makes pieces of silence sound.

Resounding
and deserted streets,
they are rivers of shadow
that go into the sea,
and the sky, frayed,
is the new
flag
that flutters
over the city.

To Her Portrait

We present this work in honor of the 325th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Mexican
1651 – 1695

This that you see, the false presentment planned
With finest art and all the colored shows
And reasonings of shade, doth but disclose
The poor deceits by earthly senses fanned!
Here where in constant flattery expand
Excuses for the stains that old age knows,
Pretexts against the years’ advancing snows,
The footprints of old seasons to withstand;

‘Tis but vain artifice of scheming minds;
‘Tis but a flower fading on the winds;
‘Tis but a useless protest against Fate;
‘Tis but stupidity without a thought,
A lifeless shadow, if we meditate;
‘Tis death, tis dust, tis shadow, yea, ‘tis nought.

Girl With Roots

I have a sepia photo
with watery eyes and a flower between the lips
someone came into this photo
and tore out the flower by the roots

O.

All year is winter next to you,
King Midas of the snow.
The swallow hidden in the hair
fled.
The tongue did not produce any more rivers
passing through cathedrals nor eucalyptus
in the towers.
Through the crack the blue wave fled
at whose center swayed the dove.

The white sky descended to drown
the trees.
The bed is the glacier that devours
the dreams.
The ice dagger appeared
to meticulously sever
the small beauty that I defend.

The sun moves further away each day
from my orbit.
There is only winter next to you,
friend.

To the River of Cosamaloapam

Mighty and enchanting river
Which irrigates the meadows of my village,
Who could weep upon thy shores
In the cold rays of the round moon?

At night in my agitated delirium
I seem to view thy groves of palms,
Thy flowering clustered orange trees,
And thy dew covered lilies.

Who would ever deign to glance
Upon that lovely, modest home of mine,
Where I was born, like the bird of the bower?

But thy waters flow at present
Over the ruins, alas! of that home
Where I passed my happy childhood.

Shadows

In honor of the Mexican holiday, Constitution Day, we present this work by one of Mexico’s great poets.

When you will be gone
The shadows will envelop me,
When you will be gone,
I will be alone with my pain.

I will evoke this idyll
During my blue hours
When you will be gone
The shadows will envelop me.

And in the darkness
Of the small bedroom
Where during a warm afternoon
I stroked all of you
My arms will look for you
My mouth will kiss you
And I will inhale from the air
That smell of roses.
When you will be gone
The shadows will envelop me.

Sad Song

María Enriqueta Camarillo
Mexican
1872 – 1968

What a squalid alleyway
Is that old Santero Street!
There you hear but one bird’s lay—
The grizzly owl’s ill-omened bleat.
What cobbles ‘neath its low eaves meet,
What hovels poot! All, all, they beat
My heart into the clay!

O stranger, go not, I entreat,
Go not through old Santero Street;
It is the squalid alleyway,
Where lies the carpenter’s retreat
That made my darling’s coffin dray.

You Foolish Men

In honor of the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, we present this work by one of Mexico’s premier colonial poets.

You foolish men who lay
the guilt on women,
not seeing you’re the cause
of the very thing you blame;

if you invite their disdain
with measureless desire
why wish they well behave
if you incite to ill.

You fight their stubbornness,
then, weightily,
you say it was their lightness
when it was your guile.

In all your crazy shows
you act just like a child
who plays the bogeyman
of which he’s then afraid.

With foolish arrogance
you hope to find a Thais
in her you court, but a Lucretia
when you’ve possessed her.

What kind of mind is odder
than his who mists
a mirror and then complains
that it’s not clear.

Their favour and disdain
you hold in equal state,
if they mistreat, you complain,
you mock if they treat you well.

No woman wins esteem of you:
the most modest is ungrateful
if she refuses to admit you;
yet if she does, she’s loose.

You always are so foolish
your censure is unfair;
one you blame for cruelty
the other for being easy.

What must be her temper
who offends when she’s
ungrateful and wearies
when compliant?

But with the anger and the grief
that your pleasure tells
good luck to her who doesn’t love you
and you go on and complain.

Your lover’s moans give wings
to women’s liberty:
and having made them bad,
you want to find them good.

Who has embraced
the greater blame in passion?
She who, solicited, falls,
or he who, fallen, pleads?

Who is more to blame,
though either should do wrong?
She who sins for pay
or he who pays to sin?

Why be outraged at the guilt
that is of your own doing?
Have them as you make them
or make them what you will.

Leave off your wooing
and then, with greater cause,
you can blame the passion
of her who comes to court?

Patent is your arrogance
that fights with many weapons
since in promise and insistence
you join world, flesh and devil.

The Anchor

Before I cast anchor in the treasure
Of my last love, I have need
To course the world, fevered as a racer —
In my pockets, youth
And a golden seed

And to embrace a serpent of the Nile
Such as the chlamys of Cleopatra hid,
And to hearken to the quiet soliloquy
Of the Virgin Mary in the pyramid

To disembark in my native land,
To make myself a child and childlike trace
On my old school slate, in crayon,
The profile of a Guadalupean face —

To kiss like the Hindoos or the Polynesians,
Like the striped wood beasts or shaggy bears.
And to cast anchor by a countrywoman of mine,
Wearing long earrings in her small ears.

And to say to Love — of all my sins
Even the blackest were passionate lovers.
Out of my cloisters a miserere rises up
And moves toward you with the steps of a baby,
Or as the white island of bubble hovers
On the surface of a coffee cup.

And, since my five fierce fingers of sense
Grasp the five great continents,
I can, O last love and ultimate goal,
Place my hand upon your Guadalupean soul.

Poets Corner

Celebrating a world of written and spoken verse

Mexican Poets