As soon as the moon rises
The pulleys will spin to alter the sky;
A border of needles will besiege memory
And the coffins will bear away those who don't work.


I
When the dark night of the soul
Found you weeping beneath its wheat-coloured stars
And the mortal sky shrunk to a murmur upon your lips:
Your heart let loose its holy elegies on the wind.

In the half-light of dawn, beside the blue illusion of your presence,
They collapse on the shorelines of my dreams.

II
And so
If I could furnish the night
With a multitude of sighs and a mouthful of death’s own ribbons,
If I could gather garlands of oblivion
And establish them in the sleep of children,
I would do it for you.

If I could weigh the interiors of a thought,
Of a moment or a whisper -
If I could distil the moonlight,
With my heart or with my hand, into a word or a seed -
I would do it for you:

For your eyes green as the wind,
And for the miniature violin
In each of your four hearts,
Playing for the dove
Imprisoned by the moon.

For your tear-soaked heart that had no choice
But became a tiny coffin.
For your mouth
That sung like a submerged bell.

III
The day became a damp rag to you,
That tore beneath the weight of the cosmos;
A cloak, under which you buried your blood,
You’re sleep, your pale azure voice.

You spoke only with the derelict tones
That had died upon other men’s lips
In solitude,
At noon,
At the half-moment just after death,
When one foot was still in each world.

Like miscarriages of the breeze
Their voices have caused your heart to wither!
Like doves silently ascending,
Becoming shadows in the wind,
The immensity of speech evaporated in your throat.
The obese wooden syllables of fury and unbearable sobbing
Established themselves behind your eyes,
With the silence of a church or a wave or a star.

IV
Among wreaths of kisses and a sea of diseased wombs,
Your eyes - like wounded flowers suspended in the breeze,
Like a sigh caught between the tide and the stars -
Trembled like cornered seahorses.

With your voice of ash and your frozen heart,
With your name whose syllables the frenzied dawn pronounces:
You galloped beneath the night like a man departing!

Your clothes, dear poet, became the rags of the earth:
Bells, departures,
The sound of farewells.

V
Have I not seen you, Federico,
Shivering in the corners of the wind
At the back of a dream?
Sleeping the sleep of a river,
Or a tree trunk,
Or a dawn?
And have I not seen you,
Your dark love,
Naked, in the dark spaces behind mirrors?
Have I not seen you
Carrying the shrivelled-up hearts
Of those whose shoes and lungs and schedules
Expired during the matinee;
During the interval of some dull afternoon?

Did I not recognise you,
In the blood
That makes its slow procession
From the sun to the toothless gutters?
In the spilt blood
Whose sinews you study so keenly!

VI
Chasing the Putas and the Doncellas;
Between the forms the sky is yet to witness
And the blue limbs it conceals from the sun -
I have heard you calling out, Sr. Lorca:
To the faggots,
Who refuse to understand the sorrow of a planetary body;
To the Jotos, Sr. Lorca,
Who were outstretched like trees against the tattered night.

Your silent prayer, Federico,
Was to listen patiently through the sterile hour;
As I listen now:
Through the screeching of the snails…

VII
I watched you walk beyond the columns of filth.
Naked and furious you went, beyond the sea of lilies,
Past the endless dreaming hours;
Past the breezes so soft you had to close your eyes;
The skeletons of tiny birds, piled up in your arms,
Which you deposited behind the eyelids
Of the women sat dying in hairdressers,
The idiot children, the artistes and the greedy;
Drowning in their algebraic sicknesses.

Your tears were enormous blossoms to the young boys
Who only loved the skeletons shed of their scents and veils,
Shed of their ribbons and their waltzes;
To the boys who trembled at the backs of wardrobes,
Curled up beneath pillows
And beneath time.
The boys do not know your voice, nor the afternoon, nor your longing:
Because you have died forever.

As you followed the emaciated Lepers of Cadiz
The stench of the hollow breath did follow you always,
The pale husks of wilting oestrogen
Surrounded you with their dual masks.

Your seven purple voices merged with the night,
With the sadness of something irrevocably lost,
Something without desire, without taste or meaning.

VIII
When I caught sight of you
(As one catches sight of a bird in the night,)
In the filth and fury of the interminable dawn,
You were dressed in autumn,
Devouring crucifixes and butterflies and clocks,
Gesturing with numbers;
Constellations for tears.

Was it not you?
When my lover suddenly became a stranger one night?
Was it not you? These dark and holy nights!

IX
Oh architect of the wind, Oh mistress of the psyche,
You took languorous strides along the geometry of the waves.
You walked alone through a kingdom of grain you could never know,
Observing the birds’ wings flash rhythmically in the sun.

The smell of the naked earth you loved
As a widow loves the smell
Of old churches, or young lovers
Lost in their heartrending gaze!
As I love you, Federico Garcia Lorca.

X
I love you,
Because the girls with rivers for eyes -
The tall mulatas with liquid waists and spines
Arcing towards heaven in passion,
With the high cheekbones and the young eyelids -
Held no beauty for you:

They placed scorn upon the sickness they replicated!
They kissed you death!
They clogged up the sewers on which the courthouses
And bone-yards and cities were built.

Instead, you fell hopelessly in love with the eternal,
With the way in which we suffer,
With the lost ghost of your self,
With the grey and pathless trails of logic from which you emerged.
The suffering, the roses drenched in darknesses, the subterranean sonatas, unspoken,
Were the forms of oblivion you became fond of.

You sought only the primordial gaze
That never, not for one moment, collapsed or slept
Or tried to love.

XI.
Your lunar voice -
Like a bell ringing in the empty sky,
Like a column of sighs lifted on petals of ash -
With the diligence of a prism,
Has rendered the grey garden yellow.

XII
And so Federico, with your spleen exposed to the sky,
The wind patiently digesting your bones;
The earth devouring those things you saved for the soil itself;
I sing of your garden of shade, hidden in the centre of the earth.
I sing of the final disintegration of taste and hours and extent.
And I sing, above all, of the silent hour;
When your body began to merge with the flowers and the sky,
When your soul tried to cling on to the names you had given it,
And tried in vain to capture a face or a number,
Anonymous beneath the newly foreign sky.

You established your home
Then, as before: in the roots:
In the leaves and mirrors,
In cutlery and maps,
In trees and in daylight.

When the heart of night itself let loose its crystal howl,
With the final disintegration of hunger and time and form,
You went on dreaming the dream of the ants.

XIII
The chinamen were arguing in the marketplace;
The cicadas were waiting, dormant
On the beds of fingernails;
And your bright guilty eyes
Suddenly came alive with nocturnal elegies:
A multitude of trembling leaves,
Were kissed by the exultant breeze.

XIV
The butterflies and the snails battled behind your eyes
With the loneliness of a midnight or a tightrope or a hillside.

The dusk found you, as it always had, weeping, weeping;
Weeping for the shells that were left behind,
For the dawn that promised to cradle you like the familiar arm of a mother.

As though upon a wave, upon the black rain of dreams,
You cast your weary tears, your ancient nets,
Into the raging storm:

Like a trapped horse drained of its strength,
You blankly observed the departing sky -
The subterranean autumn-colour of your song,
With the unimaginable coolness of roots,
Invoked the endless Sunday afternoon of the world.

XV
The invisible hand that, even now, endlessly seeks out water on your behalf -
Gestured towards the fragments of oblivion
That your every glance and word and footstep sought to assemble.

The blue music
Only heard by insects in their world –
A world in which you made you home –
Coiled around you
As you hunted the sound that your listening always obscured.

XVI
How silent now your bones!
The night wind is like an old lover to you;
How your cold waste trembles at the touch!
For you did not live in a home or a country or a love,
You lived in an idea, a dream, an absence that was real;
You lived in stone and moonlight, rivers and withered leaves.

The moonlight wore you down.
The widow’s lost kisses, the simple walks alone by the wharf,
The heavy shoulders of the unseen traveller in the night:
The dew! The dusk! The desire!
The stillness that exists at the centre of the dance.
These things alone know the full weight of your hidden heart.

XVII
And now you move across the plain your body used to inhabit;
In invisible rivers of wind
In the long winds bending poplars,
In the dark fruit of the endless tomorrow.
And in the cities;
In the church bells, in the rainy dawns,
In the wait of old men’s eyes,
In the science of their tears.

XVIII
When at night your thoughts became thought
And the waves of humanity, an impossible ocean of suffering,
Collapsed all around you,
The brittle leaves caught in your throat with the shouts and the roots,
The sorrow and longing, too, gathered in your chest:
Between the inadequate words and the foreign sky,
Between the window and the stars,
Between the fear and desire, the love and the suffering,
Between the thing-in-itself and its seasons,
Between immensities of space and those of ancient imagination,
Between the sky and the passage of day,
Between the power and the disappearances,
Between the eye’s common horizon and the mind’s sufficient zenith:
There you lay.
Mutilated, naked, alone.
The weeks became opaque and your tears became dust.
The light dying in your eyes
Was like a mirror behind a swarm of shadows.
The sky intensified and swelled with the scent of lavender.
No shelters existed for you then.
No shelters exist now.
The mortal sky turned a purple unaccustomed to the earth.
The final poem quivered coldly on your lips.
Every dream, every touch, every new morning
Converged into one long night
As you began to dream of daylight.

XIX
The Andalusian mists hug dark sleeping valleys!
The sand-coloured hills: studded with olive groves!
The green fertile plains, perpetually die of thirst!
These things that once sustained you, possessed you, followed you
Now find their way into your frozen gestures
Your eternal bones;
Your anonymous tomb.

XX
When the feast was finished,
The hollow breeze formed a cradle in your mouth.
For even the reddest rose is ghost.

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