Jerome ROTHENBERG
From TWENTY CAPRICHOS
after Goya
11
THE POWER OF THE DEAD
See the woman
on tip toes,
fancy shoes bent back.
She turns aside.
She holds a cloth
over her cheek.
She smells the effluence of death
& with her free hand
& her fingers
probes his mouth.
The wall is black. The man
above the wall
is dangling,
rope around his neck
& wrists.
The ground is lost to him.
His feet still stretch
to touch the platform,
shoeless,
but in death
no breath is left him.
Once the moon has waned
the night grows doubly
dark. A tooth
breaks loose & trembles
in her hand.
Is it the gold she seeks
or something stronger,
the power of the dead
to change the world?
A curse. A cure.
What was the song she used to sing?
The door
is not a door
until a dead man
leaves through it
& stares out sadly, crucified
some bloody morning. (F.G. Lorca)
12
THEY ARE HOT
They are hot
& what they eat
is also hot. It is
the mouth that makes
the man, the gown
that makes the monk.
We know this hombre
by his mouth lips
spread so far apart
it shows no teeth,
it is a dark hole leading to
a darker hole.
His gullet empties every hour,
his spoon, intact,
is hanging in the air.
One of his brothers groans
while eating
another leans away
& laughs. The darker servant,
set against a giant
moon, is bowing,
bobbing. Light
has sprung from nowhere,
strikes the table
& the gown,
the bald man's pate.
Is it the light of reason
or of faith
that glows around them,
a switch turned on
that shows us terror
as a human face?
13
QUÉ SACRIFICIO!
The eye of the beholder
bulges just in time
it knows the ugly man is ugly,
knows the sacrifice
is from the bottom up,
the young girl offered to
the troll she turns aside
demurely
through her closed eyes
no light flows.
The others, standing guard
feel how their blood
churns, egg him on
or crack a smile
or shield their own
eyes. Each one
takes a turn.
Each has the smell of sex
keen in his mind,
the small man's legs
like claws
clamping around her.
Qué sacrificio!
The man with pebbles in his pockets,
bib tucked under chin,
prepares to snare his prize.
There is nothing in the world
more deep
than destiny no sacrifice
like what the girl makes,
the promise of the perfect match
forgotten hidden
in the hump,
the lump he carries
like a bundle
on his back.
Scheduled for publication in 2004 by Manuel Brito's Kadle Books (Tenerife, Spain), with translations into Spanish by Heriberto Yépez.