Description:
image and poem: Return/for Ramon Alvarez/ It's better not to go back to the village, /the subverted paradise silent/ in the shatter of shrapnel. Ramon Lopez Velarda /Voices at the corner's turn/voices/through the sun's spread hand/almost liquid/shadow and light/ The carpenter whistles/the iceman whistles/three ash trees/whistling in the plaza/ The invisible/foliage of sounds growing/rising up/ Time/stretched to dry on the rooftops/ I am in Mixcoac/ Letters rot/ in the mailboxes/ The bougainvillea/against the wall's white lime/flattened by the sun/ a stain a purple/ Passionate calligraphy/ written by the sun/ I am walking back/back to what I left/or to what left me/ Memory/edge of the cliff/balcony/over the void/ I walk and do not move forward/ I am surrounded by city/ I lack air/lack body/lack/the stone that is pillow and slab/the grass that is cloud and water/ Spirit flickers/ Noon/pounding fist of light/ To collapse in an office/or onto the pavement/to end up in a hospital/the pain of dying like that/isn't worth the pain/ I look back/that passerby/nothing now but mist/ Germination of nightmares/infestation of leprous images/in the belly brains lungs/in the genitals of the college and the temple/in the movie houses/the ghost populations of desire/in the meeting-places of here and there/this and that/in the looms of language/in memory and its mansions/teeming clawed tusked ideas/swarms of reasons shaped like knives/in the catacombs in the plaza/in the hermit's well/in the bed of mirrors and in the bed of razors/in the sleepwalking sewers/in the objects in the store window/seated on their throne of glances/ The vegetation of disaster/ripens beneath the ground/ They are burning/millions and millions of old notes/in the Bank of Mexico/ On Corners and in plazas/ on the wide pedestals of public squares/ the Fathers of the Civic Church/ a silent conclave of puppet buffoons/neither eagles nor jaguars/ buzzard lawyers/locusts...
Label Text:
[from p.1] wings of ink sawing mandibles/ ventriloquist coyotes/peddlers of shadows/ beneficent satraps/the cacomistle thief of hens/the monument to the Rattle and its snake/the altar to the mauser and the machete/the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman/rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement/ Paralytic architecture/stranded districts/rotting municipal gardens/mounds of saltpeter/deserted lots/camps of urban nomads/ants' nests worm-farms/cities of the city/thoroughfares of scars/alleys of living flesh/ Funeral Parlor by a window display of coffins/whores/pillars of vain night/ At dawn in the drifting bar/the enormous mirror thaws/the solitary drinkers/contemplate the dissolution of their faces/ The sun rises from its bed of bones/ The air is not air/it strangles without arms or hands/ Dawn rips the curtains/ City/heap of broken words/ Wind/on the dusty corners/turns forward/ We never arrive/ Never reach where we are/ Not the past/the present is untouchable/ Translated by Eliot Weinberger
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1998.24b |
