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An orchard of shore trees
precise because of autumn
etches its branches
in the grey silk river
The edge of the sky
fills up with blue and soft sand
A barge bearing lights
like the leaning faces
of motionless immortal sailors
trails behind
a cat o’ nine tails
made of dark chain
punishing the silken water
We never see the river
run blood red
The yellow sun is lost forever
Its loyal sky
is crumbling
like a slow avalanche
into its thickening edge
of soft blue sand
Darkness makes
a home for the world
The serpents
rise swanlike from the water
hurl their narrow tongues
at the iron hulks
of the dreaming tethered ships
If there are humans left like me
along this natural shore
they do not dare cry out
My coat is the colour
of the ruined sky
my fingers
of the soft blue sand
When I uncovered your body
I thought shadows fell deceptively,
urging memories of perfect rhyme.
I thought I could bestow beauty
like a benediction and that your half-dark flesh
would answer to the prayer.
I thought I understood your face
because I had seen it painted twice
or a hundred times, or kissed it
when it was carved in stone.
With only a breath, a vague turning,
you uncovered shadows
more deftly than I had flesh,
and the real and violent proportions of your body
made obsolete old treaties of excellence,
measures and poems,
and clamoured with a single challenge of personal beauty,
which cannot be interpreted or praised:
it must be met.
[...]
Tonight the sky is luminous. Roads of cloud repeat themselves like the ribs of some vast skeleton.
The easy gulls seem to embody a doomed conception of the sublime as they wheel and disappear into the darkness of the mountain. They leave the heart, they abandon the heart to the Milky Way, that drunkard’s glittering line to a physical god….
[...]
[...] Meanwhile it was a clear night, and the lights in the other apartments hinted at parties five meters above our heads, leisurely conversations five meters below our feet, maybe a couple of old men listening to classical music fifteen meters in a straight line from our ribs. I was happy. It didn’t seem very late, but even if every light went out and all that was left was me and the glow of my cigarette suspended on the wonderful balcony, this particular beauty or terrible fleeting calm wouldn’t melt away. The moon seemed to creak over reality. Behind me, through the bulk of the building, I heard the whisper of traffic. Sometimes, if I was quiet, holding my cigarette motionless in the air, I could hear the click of the lights changing and then another click or, more precisely, a rhrrr, and the long cars moved on down Avenida Universidad. Three floors below, the gravel yard and the building’s garden were connected by narrow paths of black dirt bordering big trees and planters. [...]
Meanwhile I was looking at Laura, who was sitting at the other end of the room next to Lola Torrente, talking in a low voice. Every so often, our eyes met and we smiled, though not at first but centuries later, when we were eating the sandwiches that José Arco had gone out to buy at some place only he knew about, and even then we might not have been smiling because we liked each other, at least not openly, but because the energy radiated by Jan and Angélica, sitting still as statues or a blushing bride and bridegroom, was growing little by little in the tight confines of that room, and the rest of us—whether by photosynthesis or because that’s how we were back then or because in that place and on that night there was no other way to be, I swear I don’t know—began to smile at each other, more and more like brides and bridegrooms, eating and drinking deliberately and relentlessly, waiting for someone to plug in the dawn at the window under which Estrellita was sleeping.
We headed toward the center of the city, taking our time. The air finally cleared my head. It was nice to ride along on the bike and watch the streets and windows begin to wake up. People who’d been out all night drove their cars home or wherever, and workers drove their cars to work or piled into the vans or waited for the buses that would take them to work. The geometric landscape of the neighborhoods, even the colors, had a provisional look, filigreed and full of energy, and if you sharpened your gaze and a certain latent madness, you could feel sadness in the form of flying sparks, Speedy Gonzales slipping along the great arteries of Mexico City for no reason at all or for some secret reason. Not a melancholy sadness but a devastating, paradoxical sadness that cried out for life, radiant life, wherever it might be.
[...] the occult appears rather institutionalized, objectified and, to a large extent, socialized [...]
[...] The type of people we are concerned with take astrology for granted, much like psychiatry, symphony concerts or political parties; they accept it because it exists, without much reflection, provided only that their own psychological demands somehow correspond to the offer. They are hardly interested in the justification of the system. In the newspaper column to which this monograph is mainly devoted the mechanics of the astrological system are never divulged and the readers are presented only with the alleged results of astrological reasoning in which the reader does not actively participate.
[...] People always wanted to learn from occult signs what to expect and do; in fact, superstition is largely a residue of animistic magical practices by which ancient humanity tried to influence or control the course of events. But the sobriety, nay the overrealism, of our material at the expense of anything remotely reminiscent of the supranatural seems to be one of its most paradoxical and challenging features. Overrealism in itself may be, in some directions, irrational, in the sense of that overdeveloped and self-destructive shrewdness of self interest, pointed out before. In addition it will be proved during the course of our study that astrological irrationality has largely been reduced to a purely formal characteristic: abstract authority.
[...] Hardly ever does the practical advice tendered to the reader transgress the limits of what one finds in any column dealing with human relations and popular psychology. The only difference is that the writer leans on his distinctly magical and irrational authority which seems to be strangely out of proportion with the common-sense content of what he has to offer. This discrepancy cannot be regarded as accidental. [...]