Precipitations | Page 9

high above the feet?As if lonesome for them like a child.?The veins that beat heavily with the music they but half
understood?Coil languidly around the heart?And lave it in the death stream?Of a grand impersonal benignance.
PIETA
The child--?Warm chubby thighs,?Fat brown arms,?An unsurprised face--?Cries for jam.?The mother buys him with jam.
An old woman,?Tottering on lean leather skinned legs,?Sucks with glazing eyes?The crystal silken milk?That flows from the death wound?In a young flower-soft, jewel-soft body.
BRAZIL THROUGH A MIST
THE RANCH
TROPICAL LIFE
White flower,?Your petals float away?But I hardly hear them.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
The day is so long and white,?A road all dust,?Smooth monotony;?And the night at the end,?A hill to be climbed,?Slowly, laboriously,?While the stars prick our hands?Like thistles.
RAINY SEASON
A flock of parrakeets?Hurled itself through the mist;?Harsh wild green?And clamor-tongued?Through the dim white forest.?They vanished,?And the lips of Silence?Sucked at the roots of Life.
MAIL ON THE RANCH
The old man on the mule?Opens the worn saddle bags,?And takes out the papers.
From the outer world?The thoughts come stabbing,?To taunt, baffle, and stir me to revolt.?I beat against the sky,?Against the winds of the mountain,?But my cries, grown thin in all this space,?Are diluted with emptiness...?Like the air,?Thin and wide,?Touching everything,?Touching nothing.
THE VAMPIRE BAT
What was it that came out of the night??What was it that went away in the night??The little brown hen is huddled in the fence corner,?Eyes already glazing.?How should she know what came out of the night,?Or what was taken away in the night??A shadow passed across the moon.?The wind rustled in the mango trees.?And now, in the morning,?The little brown hen is huddled in the fence corner,?Eyes already glazing;?Because a shadow passed across the moon,?And the wind rustled in the mango trees.
CONSERVATISM
The turkeys,?Like hoop-skirted old ladies?Out walking,?Display their solemn propriety.
A terrible force,?Hungry and destructive,?Emanates from their mistily blinking eyes.
LITTLE PIGS
Little tail quivering,?Wrinkled snout thrusting up the mud:?He will find God?If he keeps on like that.
THE SILLY EWE
The silly ewe comes smelling up to me.?Her tail wriggles without hinges,?Both ends of it at once and equal.?Yesterday the parrot bit her;?Last week the jaguar ate her young one;?But experience teaches her nothing.
THE SNAKE
The chickens are at home in the barnyard,?The pigs in the swill,?And the flowers in the garden;?But where do you belong,?With your lacquered coils,?O snake?
THE YEAR
Days and days float by.?On the sides of the mountains?Blue shadows shift?And sift into silence.?Morning...?The cock crows.?There is that rosy glow on the mountain's edge;?Jose in the door of his hut;?Maria's lace bobbins?Tapping, tapping.?Evening...?The parrot's shrill cry;?Pale silver green stars.?Night...?The ghosts of dead Joses?And dead Marias?Sitting in the moonlight.?Peace--?Depressing,?Interminable?Peace.
BURNING MOUNTAINS
I
A herder set fire to the grass?On the other side of the valley,?And now a beautiful Indian woman?Bends, whirls, undulates,?Tosses her gold braceleted arms into the air--?Then sinks into her gray veil.
II
Fire, dying in smoke,?You stir behind the haze?Like a warrior?Who threatens in his sleep.
VILLA NOVA DA SERRA
The mountains are as dull and sodden?As drunkards' faces,?And the white forgetfulness of rain?Is like a delirium.?Along the filthy crooked streets of the little town,?Street lamps float in pools of mist--?The eyes of children being beaten.
RAIN IN THE MOUNTAINS
Like inexorable peace,?The mists march through the mountains.?One by one the grim peaks sink into the cold arms
of the unspoken.?The little town with the pink and white houses?Looses its hold on the ridge of hills?And floats among cloud tops.?A shaggy donkey, cropping grass in the sequestered church yard, Walks, with a leisurely air,?Into a wind driven abyss.
TROPICAL WINTER
The afternoon is frozen with memories,?Radiant as ice.?The sun sets amidst the agued trembling of the leaves,?Sinking right down through the gold air?Into the arms of the sea.?The enameled wings of the palm trees?Keep shivering, shivering,?Beating the gold air thin....
TALK ON THE RANCH
It is cold in the circle of mountains,?A fireless hearth.?The stars drift by like autumn leaves.?Only the rustle--?Then, close together,?Our talk,?For and counter,?One grating against the other,?Rubs a little fire?And we warm each other?There in the midst of the hollow clammy circle.
LES MALADIES DES PAYS CHAUDS
PRIDE OF RACE
I saw his young Anglo-Saxon form?In its white sailor clothes?Cleave through the scampering yellow Latin crowd,?As white and clean as the blade of an archangel;?And, as he reeled along, gloriously drunk,?Those little black and gold dung beetles?Seemed to be pushing and racing over his body.
DON QUIXOTE SOJOURNS IN RIO DE JANEIRO
White roses climb the wall of night.?A pale face looks from a window in the sky.?O Moon, is it because you have seen her that you are beautiful? Is she happy among the saints??I placed white flowers in the coffin.?Are they the blossoms that lie scattered along the horizon, Tangled in your light??Dim stars drop into the sea.?So you give my flowers back to me, do you, Bella Dona??I might gather the petals and carry them to Antonietta to trim
her hats.?So much for life with a little negro milliner?In the Rua Chile!
CONVENT MUSINGS
Eleven thousand white-faced virgins in the sky.?The eyes of