THE BODY LAID-OUT

The stone is a brow where dreams groan,
holding no winding water or frozen cypress.
The stone is a shoulder to bear time
with trees of tears, ribbons, planets.

I have watched grey rains running to the waves
lifting their fragile, riddled arms,
so as not to be caught by the outstretched stone
that unties their limbs without drinking their blood.

Because stone collects seeds and banks of cloud,
skeletons of larks and twilight wolves,
but gives up no sounds, crystals, fire, only bullrings
and bullrings, and more bullrings with no walls.

Now Ignacio the well-born lies on the stone.
Now it’s done. What passes? Contemplate his form!
Death has covered him with pale sulphur
given him the head of a dark minotaur.

Now it’s done! Rain penetrates his mouth.
Air rises mad from his sunken chest,
and love, soaked with tears of snow,
warms himself on the heights among herds.

What are they saying? A stinking silence settles.
We are with a laid-out corpse that vanishes,
with a clear form that held nightingales
and we see it riddled with countless holes.

Who disturbs the shroud? It’s not true what he says!
No one’s singing here, or weeps in a corner,
or pricks his spurs, or frightens off snakes:
here I want nothing but open eyes
to see that body that can’t rest.

I want to see the men with harsh voices here.
Those who tame horses and subdue rivers:
the men who rattle their bones and sing
with a mouth full of sun and flints.

I want to see them here. In front of the stone.
In front of this body with broken sinews.
I want them to show me where there’s an exit
for this captain bound by death.

I want them to show me grief like a river
that has sweet mists and steep banks
to bear Ignacio’s body, and let him be lost
without hearing the double snort of the bulls.

Let him be lost in the moon’s round bullring
that imitates, new, a bull stilled by pain.
let him be lost in the night with no singing of fish
and in the white weeds of congealed smoke.

I don’t want them to cover his face with a cloth,
so he can grow accustomed to death that he bears.
Go, Ignacio: don’t feel the hot bellowing.
Sleep, soar, rest: even the ocean dies!