The machine is ready to start. The symbolic beasts grow resty, curveting where they stand at their places in the great blue circle of the year. The Showman’s voice rings out. “Montez, mesdames et messieurs, montez. You, sir, must bestride the Ram. You will take the Scorpion. Yours, madame, is the Goat. As for you there, blackguard boy, you must be content with the Fishes. I have allotted you the Virgin, mademoiselle.” . . . “Polisson!” “Pardon, pardon. Evidemment, c’est le Sagittaire qu’on demande. Ohé, les dards! The rest must take what comes. The Twins shall counterpoise one another in the Scales. So, so. Now away we go, away.”

Ha, what keen air. Wind of the upper spaces. Snuff it deep, drink in the intoxication of our speed. Hark how the music swells and rings. . . . sphery music, music of every vagabond planet, every rooted star; sound of winds and seas and all the simmering millions of life. Moving, singing . . . so with a roar and a rush round we go and round, for ever whirling on a ceaseless Bank Holiday of drunken life and speed.

But I happened to look inwards among the machinery of our roundabout, and there I saw a slobbering cretin grinding at a wheel and sweating as he ground, and grinding eternally. And when I perceived that he was the author of all our speed and that the music was of his making, that everything depended on his grinding wheel, I thought I would like to get off. But we were going too fast.

^{translated from the Spanish by Leo Boix}

I have built a garden, as one makes
the right gestures in the wrong place.
Misplaced—not an error, but a being elsewhere,
like speaking with the mirror’s reflection
and not with the one who looks through it.
I have built a garden to speak there,
elbow to elbow in beauty, with death—always mute
yet active—working at the heart.
Leave the luggage behind, she repeated, now that your body
glimpses both shores—there is nothing,
the precise gestures
to let oneself go, to care for it,
and to be, the garden.
Treasure what you lose, she said—this death
speaking in flawless, distant Castilian.
What you lose, while you still have it, is the sole companion
that draws you close to the far shore of death.

Now language may loosen itself to speak.
She who never could wield the scalpel of horror,
though furnished with tools for doing, marvellous
from ominous. Terror is only digestible to the eye
if beauty bears it. Look at the blind hole:
precise and loving gestures, without reflection,
before the mirror in which all operations
are emptied of meaning.

To have a garden is to let oneself be had by it,
and by its eternal movement of departure. Flowers, seeds, and
plants die forever or renew themselves. There is
pruning, and there are moments, in the sweet dusk of a
summer afternoon, to see it exceeding itself,
while the shadow of its fall announces itself
in the dense brightness of March, or in the
dreamless sleep of the subject when it dies, while
the species that contains it never ceases to forge itself.
The garden demands, of its gardener, that she watch it die.
It demands her hand to cut back and to reshape
the naked earth, turned over in the beds
beneath the frozen night. The garden kills
and asks to be killed, in order to be a garden. But to make
correct gestures in the wrong place
dissolves the equation, uncovers páramo.
Love reclaimed through difference, like
dark blue sky against sorrow. Royal
drop of the storm in whose embrace you reach
the farthest shore.  I wish you
were here, love, but you are—a gardener and not
a garden. You unearthed my heart from your bed.

He construido un jardín …

He construido un jardín como quien hace
los gestos correctos en el lugar errado.
Errado, no de error, sino de lugar otro,
como hablar con el reflejo del espejo y no
con quien se mira en él.
He construido un jardín para dialogar
allí, codo a codo en la belleza, con la siempre
muda pero activa muerte trabajando el corazón.
Deja el equipaje repetía, ahora que tu cuerpo
atisba las dos orillas, no hay nada, más
que los gestos precisos
dejarse ir para cuidarlo y
ser, el jardín.
Atesora lo que pierdes, decía, esta muerte
hablando en perfecto y distanciado castellano.
Lo que pierdes, mientras tienes, es la sola compañía
que te allega, a la orilla lejana de la muerte.

Ahora la lengua puede desatarse para hablar.
Ella que nunca pudo el escalpelo del horror
provista de herramientas para hacer, maravilloso
de ominoso. Sólo digerible al ojo el terror
si la belleza lo sostiene. Mira el agujero
ciego: los gestos precisos y amorosos sin reflejo
en el espejo frente al cual, la operatoria carece
de sentido.

Tener un jardín, es dejarse tener por él y su
eterno movimiento de partida. Flores, semillas y
plantas mueren para siempre o se renuevan. Hay
poda y hay momentos, en el ocaso dulce de una
tarde de verano, para verlo excediéndose de sí,
mientras la sombra de su caída anuncia
en el macizo fulgor de marzo, o en el dormir
sin sueño del sujeto cuando muere, mientras
la especie que lo contiene no cesa de forjarse.
El jardín exige, a su jardinera verlo morir.
Demanda su mano que recorte y modifique
la tierra desnuda, dada vuelta en los canteros
bajo la noche helada. El jardín mata
y pide ser muerto para ser jardín. Pero hacer
gestos correctos en el lugar errado,
disuelve la ecuación, descubre páramo.
Amor reclamado en diferencia como
cielo azul oscuro contra la pena. Gota
regia de la tormenta en cuyo abrazo llegas
a la orilla más lejana. I wish you
were here amor, pero sos, jardinera y no
jardín. Desenterraste mi corazón de tu cantero.

The children are erasing
things again,
never doing it right—
I enter the room
to the sight
of their fists pressing
down on pencils,
heads bent over the page,
pushing too hard—
more smudge than blank.
We’re drawing you, they say
when I ask. If you put a pencil
on a table where
children draw
and write, what happens
to their mother? I
mistook
myself for her, letting
them erase me limb by limb
even as they sketched me
out again with each
and every cry,
Mama, mama, mine.
Last night I was reading
De Kooning’s biography—
the part where the author describes
how the artist felt
when Rauschenberg
asks him for a drawing
in order to erase it. To
let something go
because you love the fact of another’s
making more than you love
what you’d already made.
De Kooning said yes.
“It is no use worrying,” he wrote,
“about being related to something
it is impossible
not to be related to.”

^{Then into your life
there comes a darkness
    —Radiohead}
 

It’s never our finest hour in America but right now,
most things at the ledges of my life are like the sad
shuffling at the edge of an LP. This one time, I forgot

to pick up the tonearm & heard polyvinyl lamentations
until Thursday when I finally realized the sounds were from
my speakers & not one of my own haunted creation.

I would have laughed, but it was war time yet again:
more air strikes crumbling schools, more drone opportunities
& misplaced homilies. You got to be kidding me.

Polished tanks cresting possibility’s hill for another,
unrequited salvo. All the mystifying UFOs & split
infinities in the record’s imaginary are in the past as it

kept playing its static goodbyes: little hiccupping pleas
until somebody, finally, flipped off the infernal machine.

^{If death is the absence of life, / then death’s death is life.
—Sun Ra}

      Gather your losses, oblong
& indiscriminate: avocado rot,
      football, cracked soap dish;
dropped eggshells, embryo
      gone. Gather mutilated joy.
Smelted promises. Aloft,
      here & now. In open air.
Gather your heartbreak, wind-
      ing & windowless. Animal
the shadow, lurking
      at the edges
of your mouth.
      Needle into a nest
your intricate sorrows.
      Roost there. Gather
yourself. In a clearing—
      Or gather your losses
like twin sheets, stripped
      from a sick child’s bed.
I know I know it’s difficult
      to face it alone.
To know you must
      gather your darkness
or lose yourself to the animal
      that thrives therein. To vanquish
your losses in daylight,
      gather your life
by the scruff. Hold on
      to what you can.

I think Cliff Swallow sounds like the name
of a beige-clad mortgage broker who hangs
out at the bar and doesn’t talk politics, but
it’s a bird I’m reading about to keep my mind
from diving fast into the abyss. If someone asked
what changed me first, I’d say love. Secondly,
I’d say death. Does the order matter? When I took
to birds I thought I’d be destroyed by staring
at flying, twittering blurs, but what destroys me
is what always destroys me. A friend once said,
every elegy is a love poem and every love poem
is an elegy. But there must be a difference. Trying
once to identify swallows darting in and out
of the shadows above the creek water slick with
reflections of willows and white alders above us,
I asked a friend,  What kind of swallows are those?
He squinted, and we all watched, the sky’s mirror
rippling in the shallow creek bed, the wet rocks
emerging like islands we might retire to when we
shrink into nothing.  Fast ones, he said, turning,
and shrugged. So much for the naming. Instead
a pointing to the flitting minutes so they lasted,
until they didn’t. Then all of us leaned over
the railing and stared at the quickly thinning light
and all that the light contained, all of us calmly
unable to distinguish, to classify, but we could
show each other the whole view, practically
holding each other by the collar so no one
drowned, as we watched every last fast
flyer swoop, yes, we praised what lives and what
disappears, we made use of the end of the light.