[A animal hidden...] Poem by Antonio Gamoneda

An animal hidden in twilight watches me and half pities itself. The bad fruit weighs heavily, the body's chambers boil. It's exhausting to pass through this illness full of mirrors. Someone whistles in my heart. I don't know who, but I understand the endless syllable.

Blood streaks my thoughts, I write on black tombstones. I am the strange animal. I recognize myself: licking the eyelids he loves, bearing on his tongue patrilineal substances. I am myself, no doubt: he sings voicelessly and sits himself down to contemplate death, but he sees only lamps and flies and the legends of funeral tapes. Sometimes he shouts into still afternoons.


The invisible is inside the light, but does something burn in the invisible? Our church is impossibility. In any case, the animal refuses to frazzle in agony.


It goes awake in me when I sleep. It was never born and, nevertheless, it's just died.


So things go, from what lost clarity do we come? Who can remember nonexistence? It might be sweeter, even, to return, but


we wander indecisively through a forest of thorns. There's nothing beyond the last prophecy. We dreamed a god licked our hands: no one will see the divine mask.


So things go,


madness is perfect.
Translated by Forrest Gander