Antonio Gamoneda / I Know

I KNOW
 CONOZCO

By Antonio Gamoneda

I KNOW the butcher bird. He sings and they come flocking to his white claws. Later, he crucifies them on the hawthorns. He cracks and sings because of love and feeds on what he crucifies. He dreams of bloody petals. Who knows if it’s the bird who weeps.

In other times,

I saw the horse’s soul, its teeth against the dew. There is a horse inside my eyes and it’s the father of the ones who later learned to weep. Now

someone treads upon my dreams. I think of how the snakes passed sleekly over my heart

to listen to the blood. Where? In the blue fistula or in the blind arteries? There, iron whistles, or perhaps it burns; we’re nothing more than miserable hemoglobin. There, the bones weep, their music intervening in the bodies. Finally, purified by cold, we’re real in disappearance.

Shit and love under earthly light. I abandon my veins to the fecundity of the black seeds and my heart to the insects.

My heart, this humid cavern that, with neither end nor cause, impersonates the systole’s monotony.

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.

Antonio Gamoneda / I Saw

I SAW
VI
by Antonio Gamoneda

Shrouded
in light.

bodies that bordered
the cold ditches.