La mujer, entre tanto, de su boca de fresa
Retorciéndose como una sierpe entre brasas
Y amasando sus senos sobre el duro corsé,
Decía estas palabras impregnadas de almizcle:
«Son húmedos mis labios y la ciencia conozco
De perder en el fondo de un lecho la conciencia,
Seco todas las lágrimas en mis senos triunfales.
Y hago reír a los viejos con infantiles risas.
Para quien me contempla desvelada y desnuda
Reemplazo al sol, la luna, al cielo y las estrellas.
Yo soy, mi caro sabio, tan docta en los deleites,
Cuando sofoco a un hombre en mis brazos temidos
O cuando a los mordiscos abandono mi busto,
Tímida y libertina y frágil y robusta,
Que en esos cobertores que de emoción se rinden,
Impotentes los ángeles se perdieran por mí.»
Cuando hubo succionado de mis huesos la médula
y muy lánguidamente me volvía hacia ella
A fin de devolverle un beso, sólo vi
Rebosante de pus, un odre pegajoso.
Yo cerré los dos ojos con helado terror
y cuando quise abrirlos a aquella claridad,
A mi lado, en lugar del fuerte maniquí
Que parecía haber hecho provisión de mi sangre,
En confusión chocaban pedazos de esqueleto
De los cuales se alzaban chirridos de veleta
O de cartel, al cabo de un vástago de hierro,
Que balancea el viento en las noches de invierno.
Un idiota había que rezaba
(igual que tú y yo)
a un trapo y a un hueso y a un mechón de pelo
(le llamábamos la mujer despreocupada)
pero el idiota te llamaba su dama perfecta-
(igual que tú y yo)
Oh, los años perdidos, las lágrimas perdidas
y el trabajo de nuestra cabeza y mano
pertenece a la mujer que no sabía
(ahora sabemos que no podía nunca saber)
y no comprendíamos.
Un idiota había que sus bienes gastaba
(igual que tú y yo)
honor, fe, una tentativa segura
(y no sólo era eso lo que la señora quería decir)
pero un idiota debe seguir su instinto natural
(igual que tú y yo)
Oh, el trabajo perdido, los tesoros perdidos
y las mejores cosas planeadas
pertenecen a la mujer que no sabía por qué
(ahora sabemos que no sabía nunca por qué)
y no comprendíamos.
El idiota reducido fue a su pellejo idiota
(igual que tú y yo)
lo que puede ella haber visto que le dejó de lado-
(pero no recuerda nadie cuando la dama lo intentó)
así algunos de ellos vivieron, la mayoría han muerto
(igual que tú y yo)
Y no es la vergüenza ni la culpa
que hiere como un tizón al rojo-
se llega a saber que ella nunca supo por qué
(viendo, al fin, que no pudo nunca saber por qué)
y nunca pudimos comprender.
Aeons of aeons ago, in an epoch whose marvelous worlds have crumbled, and whose mighty suns are less than shadow, I dwelt in a star whose course, decadent from the high, irremeable heavens of the past, was even then verging upon the abyss in which, said astronomers, its immemorial cycle should find a dark and disastrous close.
Ah, strange was that gulf-forgotten star – how stranger than any dreams of dreamers in the spheres of to-day, or than any vision that hath soared upon visionaries, in their retrospection of the sideral past! There, through cycles of a history whose piled and bronze-writ records were hopeless of tabulation, the dead had come to outnumber infinitely the living. And built of a stone that was indestructible save in the furnace of suns, their cities rose beside those of the living like the prodigious metropoli of Titans, with walls that overgloom the vicinal villages. And over all was the black funereal vault of the cryptic heavens-a dome of infinite shadows, where the dismal sun, suspended like a sole, enormous lamp, failed to illumine, and drawing back its fires from the face of the irresolvable ether, through a baffled and despairing beam on the vague remote horizons, and shrouded vistas illimitable of the visionary land.
We were a sombre, secret, many-sorrowed people-we who dwelt beneath that sky of eternal twilight, pierced by the towering tombs and obelisks of the past. In our blood was the chill of the ancient night of time; and our pulses flagged with a creeping prescience of the lentor of Lethe. Over our courts and fields, like invisible sluggish vampires born of mausoleums, rose and hovered the black hours, with wings that distilled a malefic languor made from the shadowy woe and despair of perished cycles. The very skies were fraught with oppression, and we breathed beneath them as in a sepulcher, forever sealed with all its stagnancies of corruption and slow decay, and darkness impenetrable save to the fretting worm.
Vaguely we lived, and loved as in dreams-the dim and mystic dreams that hover upon the verge of fathomless sleep. We felt for our women, with their pale and spectral beauty, the same desire that the dead may feel for the phantom lilies of Hadean meads. Our days were spent in roaming through the ruins of lone and immemorial cities, whose palaces of fretted copper, and streets that ran between lines of carven golden obelisks, lay dim and ghastly with the dead light, or were drowned forever in seas of stagnant shadow; cities whose vast and iron-builded fanes preserved their gloom of primordial mystery and awe, from which the simulacra of century- forgotten gods looked forth with unalterable eyes to the hopeless heavens, and saw the ulterior night, the ultimate oblivion. Languidly we kept our gardens, whose grey lilies concealed a necromantic perfume, that had power to evoke for us the dead and spectral dreams of the past. Or, wandering through ashen fields of perennial autumn, we sought the rare and mystic immorteles, with sombre leaves and pallid petals, that bloomed beneath willows of wan and veil-like foliage: or swept with a sweet and nepenthe-laden dew by the flowing silence of Acherontic waters.
And one by one we died and were lost in the dust of accumulated time. We knew the years as a passing of shadows, and death itself as the yielding of twilight unto night.
Perplexed I stood amidst the darkness of night,
Haunted by the news that scrolled on the screen.
A fourteen year old- drained by her kith.
What was her sin?
Born of a beast was not her fault
Never a reason to be deflowered!
Her father was her hero
The strongest of her world.
But tongue tied she stood, when
The might she adored,
Pounced and muscled in
Then in turn brother, uncles, the malevolent villains.
Incessant incest clipped her wings,
Coerced girl sighed and sobbed
But in vain, tears of prey
Predator never weighs!
Temporal carnal desire
overshadows parental love,
Is still an enigma
rather a stigma!
Most literate yet we boast
Debating a lot bear no fruit
Actions are needed result is wanted
Young blood, plea to thee
Hold her tight, spare them not,
Be the harbingers of spring
Drive the demons off the shore,
“God’s own abode” be of yours!
