Songs of Stone and Water

Songs of Stone and Water
Translation by Kimberly Contag, Ph.D.



PRELUDE

Sometimes we climb a body with words
beyond its limits we try to pierce the dark alley
a furor of kisses
and the demolition of entreaties

a body is an abundant silence
in which mirrors confuse images
and touch becomes light

sometimes a body is an apparition

the splendor of bare flesh blinds us in an instant
we love it ephemerally
and we flood it with our soul

then we empty ourselves



FIRST CANTO

i write you from my mouth
i raise my voice to drink with you the best silences
i live naked within your lips

my crysanthemum mouth
soaring over glass

wounded witch in her queries stone
ajar in the fleshy reality of the mirrors.

SECOND CANTO

you perceive intuitively that i love ferociously
i am incapable of remaining still
i walk outside my body without staring at the leaves
that conceal the choppy air.
on the plain, wide like the sky
they have hung cords of red frost
the judges raise their songs
and the trill of the birds
rests
like a dry weed.
a sea exists behind closed doors
i hear her dark windings
the shipwreck of gaping mouths.
condemned to the other shore
i don’t find the porthole of light.
the key is only a bridge toward nothingness.

i write you
from the one who loves wind
and who leaves her body
like a bird petrified
in excesses

dense night
my heart slashes through total blindness

between a thrust of life
and another of death
voluptuous your flower stiffens.


THIRD CANTO

i am the one who inhabits this sea-less city and writes
with the dust of its domes

cuenca rains on the inside
she raises tokens
sleepwalking and drunken
with her karma of loneliness upon loneliness
she announces her hovering hamlets

her displaced gods
her teardrop into memory

i have drunk the chill that resounds in baskets with you
let me love you beyond limits

the women move on giving suckle
doves carry off the golden countenance
and the retama bushes
the rivers
have filled their paths with names

we have traveled together along the streets
with laughter searing our feet
and
we descended
stairs
stairs
tempestuously migratory
until we reached the moss of the sleeping city

cuenca
is a landscape that always opens in the same location

i write you
from my own fear
suddenly
your gaze rests on itself
and is no longer fruit
bird
or
mirror
on which side of anguish did my heart fall?

FOURTH CANTO

what are we but you alone?
explicit image of ourselves

you inhabit my body and you grow dark

just as the talon print of the bird
repeats its image
in the sand

you are our life
but
not perishable


ARIA

FIRST CANTO

unvanquished city
you display your memoria
along the avenue of monuments

no one knows whatever is profane in you

like weary birds your women
advance
with a dream in their hands
who besides you
awaits their names?

the girls fasten their hair in braids
hold each other’s hands
and the embroidered narcissi stroll

who besides you
hides between their footprints?

you are
renewed always
and you inhabit us

the girls cover their breasts
with forget-me-nots
who besides you
opens their cage?

adolescent city
you are
my desired prey


SECOND CANTO

immobile
vaporous

in your sleeping body
i seek the exact brush stroke
that describes
your corridor of goblins

your rivers
liquid walls
splendid

and
painful
city of sepulchers

eroded domes and streets

men
leaves
of autumn

women
narcissi

my ungrateful one

THIRD CANTO

dawn
breaks
the bells spin
in the naked air

i will wait
until the wind fills my cup again
with a compact light
it will burst in circles
until
it yields results

FOURTH CANTO

i write you
from my distress
pecked by black birds
fallen hands
invisible
reality

I get up
and
cinch your belt
i drink within you
my best memories

salt
and
bitter air

the solid purity of lime
the rain between your thighs

drunken and sleepwalking
city of precipices

i love
your peaceful eyes of a village girl
i hate
your routine blinking


your voice without a core
denying
your very essence

city of broken bridges
you have no limits during the day
and
like an apparition
you fall apart for us
at night

CHORUS

FIRST CANTO

who looks inside you
celestial and lonesome city
lonesome
city of cold?

i write you
and i let my soul drift away
in the naked night

seeded
between the cliff and the magnolia

my heart is
fruit
already
ripe

who watches secretly
beneath your anguish?

amorous one you can
devour me

because I hang
on your silence

open your lips
call me
your voice
will be a drop of blood

on my defunct chest

SECOND CANTO

i
constructed your body
and i have gone out in search of you

with each footprint

you have trussed me to you
with your bridges and symbols

defenseless
you follow me through your squares
and
i discover you in each face

then the words
climb along your body

to a shadowy page


THIRD CANTO

Oh, you who are guarded by my soul

let yourself by carried by the hallucination
of my words
mirror and echo

hear me
in the thunderings of your rivers
in the black bells
of your name
i
am
you
i

in this brief flicker of memory
and oblivion

spread your light towards me
sleeping city

for I will look for myself in you
now and forever

i am the woman who unfolds herself
like a willow
on the bank

i am the mirror
that repeats your image
like an echo


FOURTH CANTO

at the end of all paths
i have returned to you

trowelings of moonlight
bury the last gesture
the last word

i have grasped your signal

destiny nostalgia and resistance
lone territory of my soul




Translation by Kimberly Contag, Ph.D.