I SAW the golden flames descend Poem by Antonio Gamoneda

I SAW the golden flames descend upon the walls of shadow. This was before the advent of the symbols.

The clay burned in the silence and, behind the sweetness ringed with magnets, spaces would open in which, later, I would realize the impossibility of differentiating cruelty from mercy.

Later still, disappearance was the only virtue of the beloved faces.

I reached an age in which my body shared the light, which, in turn, was both within me and beyond me: they were the fever and the revelation in the instant of shedding childhood. It happened, between waking and not waking, under sharp invisible wheels. Eternity anticipated its doubleness: it didn't exist, but it was still luminous and frightening.

I was a guest at the compression of the fire. Around me I sensed hawthorn belts and the precision of the knives gone missing in the snow. I discovered a void on whose escarpments extended fields of motionless poppies. I learned to howl while glasses broke inside my eyes.

My youth was driven by technified lightning bolts beyond the flowers in their flaming habits. I saw, inside abandoned bedrooms, cracks through which the reptiles of weeping poked their heads.

I met the cold and, past the symbols, I saw judicial footprints.

I saw, too, tortured bones. Back then they raised in me the great, the useless questions. I was afraid before the stillness of the maternal curtains.

Later I learned the loveliness of certain ulcers and, in the arterial tissue, the piping that communicates both pleasure and death.

I dreamed and the dream was another life inside my body and its plot was about pain and pain preceded thought and was deduced from ailing cells.

I lost my way in this additional creation; discovered there was nothing more than madness in bodies interacting.

I thought once more about the torturers, again I saw

fruits petrified by silence and, between my hands, my father's teeth (extracted from the humid earth). I had to calculate the value of the black costume jewels received by unknown lovers and, one day, melancholy revealed itself, wired from the heart to the intestines.

I saw poverty through oblivion and also saw, just once, my mother's face smiling over cotton and steel. Just once.



This is my story, this is my creation. There's nothing else in the cold bedroom. Outside,
abandoned, are the baskets of sorrow, excrements glazed over with dew, and the great
announcements of happiness.