Cities
Cities are images
All you need is a schoolboy's notebook to carry out
the absurd like of poetry
in its first stages:
strangeness raised to Dürer's third power,
and a pain that never gets to be itself,
in a melancholy way.
Two white rats runs in a circle
at the speed of neurosis;
after whirling around for a full sixty days
in the big world as in a cage,
I set my mind on one thought:
rats going in circles.
White, shaggy, little sphere
split in halves that jump to unite,
but where the cut was, the confused softness
and the pain, there are now those little legs,
and between them different sexes,
counterbalanced sexes.
Things come out of us from where we were
completely apart, apart complete.
five minutes of hate, in all...five minutes.
Cities are like getting lost on the same old
street, in that part of the world, never in another.
What is it that wouldn't matter
if it were to be made whole again, in short,
to be pettily identical to what's different?
Sun of the final day; what a great way to end
poetry and its work!
In the big world as in a cage
I tune a dangerous instrument.
─Translated from the Spanish by David Unger
Sea Breeze
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