Saturday, August 13, 2011

Antonio Gamoneda / An Animal


AN ANIMAL
By Antonio Gamoneda
Translated por Robin Myers
 UN ANIMAL


AN ANIMAL, concealed in twilight, keeps watch and takes pity on me. The rotted fruits hang low, the corporal chambers boil. It’s tiring to cross this sickness full of mirrors. Somebody whistles in my heart. I don’t know who it is, but I understand its interminable syllable.

There is blood in my thoughts, I write across black headstones. I myself am the unknown animal. I recognize myself: it licks the lids it loves, it carries the paternal substances upon its tongue. It’s me, there is no doubt: it sings without a voice and sits to ponder death, but it sees nothing more than lamps and flies and legends of the funeral ribbons. Sometimes it shouts in the immobile afternoons.

The invisible lies within the light, but is there anything that burns within the invisible? What’s impossible is our church. In any case, the animal refuses to exhaust itself in agony.

This is what remains awake in me when I’m asleep. It’s still unborn and yet, regardless, it must die.

If this is so, then which lost clarity do we come from? Who can remember nonexistence? It could be sweeter to return, but still

we enter, indecisively, a forest of thorns. There is nothing beyond the final prophecy. We’ve dreamed about a god that licked our hands: no one will see its sacred mask.
If this is so,

then madness is perfect.


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