Who's making that din, and won't let
the rising islands be accounted.

     A little more regard
till it's late, early,
and the guano can be better
assayed, the simple putrid-trove
the briny pelican gratuitously offers
the insular heart
at every hyaloid
                       fling.

     A little more regard
and the liquid manure, six in the evening
              OF THE PROUDEST B-FLATS.

     And the peninsula arches
its back, muzzled, unafraid,
on the deadly line of balance.
 
 

TRILCE   XXI

     In a car arteried with vicious circles,
December returns so changed,
his gold in disgrace. What a sight:
December with its 31 flittered hides,
                                poor devil.

     I remember him. Our splendid selves were there,
mouths curled up with ill-nurtured pride,
all trailing endless forebodings.
How could I not recall
that spare Mister Twelve.

     I remember him. And now December returns
how changed, his breath ominous;
freezing, snivelling humiliation.

     And the ostrich, gentleness itself,
how he loved her, how he worshipped her.
But she has put on all his changes.
 
 

TRILCE LII

     And we'll get up when we feel like it,
although Mother, all clarity,
with her beautiful and birdsong
maternal anger wakes us.
We'll laugh slyly at this,
chewing the edge of the warm vicuña bedspreads
- and you can't do things to me!

     The smoke from the thatched cabins - rough
urchins! They'd rise early to play with
their blue, bluish kites,
and stealing roof-beams and stones, they would give us
                                      to take out
to the infant air that doesn't even know its letters,
to battle over strings.

     Another day you'll want to pasture
among your navel hollows
                     ravenous caverns
                  ninth months,
                     my curtains.
Or you'll want to accompany the ancient
to unplug the opening of a twilight,
so that by day it jets
all the water that passes at night.

     And you arrive dying of laughter
and in the musical lunch,
roasted maize, flour with lard,
with lard,
you pull the leg of the stretched-out farmhand
who once again forgets to say good day,
those days of his, good with the b of beggar,
that insist on emerging from the poor man
by the buttock of the v
dentilabial that watches over him. 
 
 

TRILCE LIX

     The terrestrial sphere of love
that lagged below, turns round
and round without stopping a second,
and we are condemned to suffer,
as a centre, its rotation.

     Motionless Pacific, glass, pregnant
with every possibility.
Cold Andes, inhumanable, pure.
Perhaps. Perhaps. 

     The sphere spins on the flint of time,
and sharpens,
sharpens till it wants to lose itself;
it spins forging, before the deserted flanks,
that point so frighteningly known,
because it has gestated, turn
and turn again,
the familiar little corral. 

     Centrifugal it goes yes, yes,
Yes,
yes, yes, yes, yes: NO!
And I withdraw till blue, and retreating
grow hard, until I clutch my soul!
 
 

TRILCE LXV

     Mother, tomorrow I'm off to Santiago 
to drench myself in your blessing and in your lament. 
I am arranging my disillusions and the sore's
pink of my false bustling.

     Your arch of surprise will wait for me,
the tonsured columns of your life-wasting
longings. The patio will wait for me,
the hallway downstairs with its moldings and festive
ornaments. My tutor armchair will wait for me,
that good big-jawed furniture of dynastic
leather, that does nothing but grumble at the great-
great-grandchild buttocks, from strap to little strap.

     I am sifting my purest affections, 
I'm axising, Can't you hear the plummet panting? 
                   Can't you hear the reveilles straining? 
I am shaping your formula of love
for all the hollows of this soil. 
Oh if all the silent wheels were disposed
to all the most distant ribbons, 
to all the most different dates.

     Thus, dead immortal. Thus.
Under the double arches of your blood, through
which one must pass so stealthily, that even my father
to go through there,
humbled himself down to less than half-man,
until being the first child you had.

     Thus, dead immortal.
Between the colonnade of your bones
that even a sob cannot tumble down,
and into whose side not even Destiny 
could intrude a single finger of his.

                         Thus, dead immortal.
                Thus.
 
 

Translated by Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi, from their forthcoming translation of Trilce. They have also collaborated on Cesar Vallejo: Complete Later Poems 1923-1938.  Both volumes are forthcomng from Shearsman Books.