Beauty and the Illiterate

Often, in the Repose of Evening her soul took a lightness from

the mountains across, although the day was harsh and

tomorrow foreign.

But, when it darkened well and out came the priest’s hand over

the little garden of the dead, She

Alone, Standing, with the few domestics of the night—the blowing

rosemary and the murmur of smoke from the kilns—

at sea’s entry, wakeful

Otherly beauty!

Only the waves’ words half-guessed or in a rustle, and others

resembling the dead’s that startle in the cypress, strange

zodiacs that lit up her magnetic moon-turned head.

And one

Unbelievable cleanliness allowed, to great depth in her, the real

landscape to be seen,

Where, near the river, the dark ones fought against the Angel,

exactly showing how she’s born, Beauty

Or what we otherwise call tear.

And long as her thinking lasted, you could feel it overflow the

glowing sight bitterly in the eyes and the huge, like an

ancient prostitute’s, cheekbones

Stretched to the extreme points of the Large Dog and of the Virgin.

“Far from the pestilential city I dreamed of her deserted place

where a tear may have no meaning and the only light be

from the flame that ravishes all that for me exists.

“Shoulder-to-shoulder under what will be, sworn to extreme silence

and the co-ruling of the stars,

“As if I didn’t know yet, the illiterate, that there exactly, in extreme

silence are the most repellent thuds

“And that, since it became unbearable inside a man’s chest, solitude

dispersed and seeded stars!”

Source: Eros Eros Eros: Selected and Last Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1998)