TRILCE

by César Vallejo

II

       Time Time.

       Noon drones between dews.
Barracks’ bored tank shrinks
time time time time.

       Was Was.

       Roosters sing scratching in vain.
Clear day’s mouth conjugates
was was was was.

       Tomorrow Tomorrow.

       Even being’s hot rest even.
The present thinks save me for
tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow.

       Name Name.

       Whadda you call what cuts us?
It’s called Just the Same and suffers
name name name namE.

XII

       I escape a feint, hair by hair.
Where’s that bullet gonna fall?
Doubts. Over the hills. Cervical joining.

       Click of a fly dying
in mid-flight and falls to earth.
What’s Newton gonna say now?
But you’re all children, of course.

       Doubts. Heels which won’t turn.
Knotted little face, five
little thorns on one side
and five on the other: Hush! He’s coming out.

XX

       Jamb armored even with the cream
of ideal stone. So I hardly
got 1 next to 1 so I won’t fall.

       That mustached guy. Sun,
its single wheel wounded, fifth and perfect,
and from there on up.
Racket of my fly buttons,
       free,
racket which blames vertical A subordinated.
The legal chain. The happy prick.

       But it hurts. It hurts over there. Way over there it hurts.

       And so I’m drooling, I’m
a nice person, while the williamthesecond man
puffs and sweats happiness
in gushes, polishing the shoes
of his three year old girl.

      He’s all duded up in his beard
and rubs his side.
So the girl puts her finger
on her tongue that’s starting to spell
the puzzles of puzzles of puzzles,
and smears the other shoe, in secret,
with some spit and dirt,
       but with just a
          little bi-
              .t.

XXXIII

       999 calories.
Rumbbb . . . . Trraprrrr rrach . . . chaz
Snaky u of the biscuit man
giraffed to the eardrum.

       Who like the frosts. But nooo.
Who like what happens more or less.
Who like the golden mean.

      1.000 calories.
The gringo heaven shines blue
and laughs its huge slug. The
peacocked sun goes down and shakes the frozen
to his bones.

      The cuckoo mimics: Cheeeeeeewwwiinngg. . . . . .
soft car, thirst mobile,
which runs to the beach.

       Air, air! Ice!

      If only the heat (------Better
                  say nothing.

       And even the very pen
I write with splits at last.

       Thirty three trillion three hundred thirty
three calories.

XXXIX

       Who lit a match!
I’m rocking myself. I smile
swinging for a reason.
I smile even more, if everyone comes
to see the colorless ropes
and me always up top. What do I care.

       Not even that old Sun which, dying of pleasure,
bets everything to spread it
around the shadows, the spendthrift,
not even he’ll wait for me on the other side.
Not even the rest of them who get up alone
entering and leaving.

       The great baker calls
with a knock on your retina.
And we pay in
funny-looking signs the undeniably warm money
baked, transcendent.
And we drink our coffee, it’s late,
with not enough sugar, there’s a shortage,
and bread with no butter. What’re you gonna do?

       But, for sure, the tightened hoops, all barred up.
Health on a single foot. Forward: march!

XLIV

       This piano trips right through me,
trips in happy leaps.
Then it meditates in iron-bound rest
nailed with ten horizons.

       Forward. It drags itself under tunnels,
out there, under tunnels of pain,
under vertebra which flee of course.

       At other times its trumpets are going,
slow asias yellow with life,
going as eclipses,
which pluck insectile nightmares,
already dead to thunder, herald of genesis.

       Dark piano, who are you spying on
with your deafness that hears me,
with your dumbness that deafens?

       Oh mysterious pulse.

LVII

       The highest points are cratered, love’s
points, from being upper case, I drink, don’t eat, ab-
sorb heroin for pain, for the limp
beating and in spite of any correction.

       Can I say they’ve betrayed us? No.
That everyone was good? Nope. But
there’s doubtless good will,
and especially, being like that.

       And who loves himself a lot! I look for me
in my own intention which I must have
made, in vain: nothing’s been freed.

       And yet, who’s pushing me.
I bet I won’t dare close the fifth window.
And the role of loving oneself and persisting, next to
the hours and what’s not allowed.

       And the this and the that.

LX

       My patience is wood,
deaf, vegetal.

       OK Day you’ve been pure, childish, useless,
born naked, your walking
leagues, they’re running over
your twelve extremities, that frowning doubleness
which later unravels
in who knows what last diapers.

       Constellated with clotted hemispheres,
under eternal unpublished Americas, your great plumage,
you take off and leave me, without your ambiguous emotion,
without your dream knots, Sunday.

       And my patience gets moth eaten,
and I cry again: When will that mouthy Sunday
come, mute from the grave;
when will it come to cart off this
ragged Saturday, this horrible suture
of pleasure that engenders us without thinking,
and the pleasure that ExileSS us.

LXVIII

       We’re at the fourteenth of July.
It’s five in the afternoon. It rains all over
a third corner of my blotting paper.
And ow it rains more down than up.

       Two lakes my hands move ahead
deep in ten,
from a swampy Tuesday which six days ago
is frozen in my tear ducts.

       A week’s throat is cut
with the sharpest of falls; you’ve done
everything that miserable genius can do
in the great tavern without rails. We’re ok
now, with this rain washing us
and making us happy and serenely smiling.

       We’ve walked a dead weight and, with a single
                               challenge,
whitened our animal purity.
And we ask about eternal love,
about the final meeting,
about what goes from here to there.
And we answer from where mine are mine and not yours,
from what time’s the staff, which when carried,
holds up and isn’t held up. (Nude).

       And it was black, hanging in a corner,
not offering a thing, my jacket,
a
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i
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Translated by John M. Bennett
December 2004-January 2005

From the first edition of TRILCE by Cesar Vallejo,
Lima: Talleres Tipográficos de la Penitenciaría, 1922.