Notebook Of A Return To The Native Land

At the end of daybreak. . .

Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it,

I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope.

Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned

toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face

of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a

never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the

monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a

river of turtledoves and savanna clover which I carry forever

in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most

arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force

of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed

venereal sun.

At the end of daybreak burgeoning with frail coves, the hungry

Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dyn-

amited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust

of this town sinisterly stranded.

At the end of daybreak, the extreme, deceptive desolate eschar

on the wound of the waters; the martyrs who do not bear witness;

the flowers of blood that fade and scatter in the empty wind

like the screeches of babbling parrots; an aged life mendacious-

ly smiling, its lips opened by vacated agonies; an aged poverty

rotting under the sun, silently; an aged silence bursting with

tepid pustules,

the awful futility of our raison d’être.

At the end of daybreak, on this very fragile earth thickness

exceeded in a humiliating way by its grandiose future—the vol-

canoes will explode, the naked water will bear away the ripe

sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked

at by sea birds—the beach of dreams and the insane awakening.

At the end of daybreak, this town sprawled-flat, toppled from

its common sense, inert, winded under its geometric weight of

an eternally renewed cross, indocile to its fate, mute, vexed

no matter what, incapable of growing with the juice of this

earth, self-conscious, clipped, reduced, in breach of fauna

and flora.

2001. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith