Antonio Gamoneda

1931 / Oviedo

I KNOW the butcher bird

I KNOW the butcher bird. He sings and they come flocking to his white claws. Later, he crucifies them on the hawthorns. He cracks and sings because of love and feeds on what he crucifies. He dreams of bloody petals. Who knows if it's the bird who weeps.

In other times,

I saw the horse's soul, its teeth against the dew. There is a horse inside my eyes and it's the father of the ones who later learned to weep. Now

someone treads upon my dreams. I think of how the snakes passed sleekly over my heart

to listen to the blood. Where? In the blue fistula or in the blind arteries? There, iron whistles, or perhaps it burns; we're nothing more than miserable hemoglobin. There, the bones weep, their music intervening in the bodies. Finally, purified by cold, we're real in disappearance.

Shit and love under earthly light. I abandon my veins to the fecundity of the black seeds and my heart to the insects.

My heart, this humid cavern that, with neither end nor cause, impersonates the systole's monotony.
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