Persephone (Excerpt)
He was the endless dark certainty, the only one.
Always sullen with his thick eyebrows hiding
his eyes, so straight, vertical, and yet as if stooping,
self-enclosed, in his hair almost invisible, biting
a leaf or smoking his clay pipe, and the little fire
shone his nostrils from under up as if he gleamed
far away in a deserted fleshy and inviting landscape;
he imbibed me. Two bronze hooks hanged off
the blind basement wall. They shone in a mystical
green-black colour; perhaps someone trained there or
perhaps a handsome young man hanged himself there.
I enjoyed looking at them: two open holes leading
to nothing, I could fill them with whatever I wished.
You remember the statue we saw in the Gymnasium
one afternoon? It was made of gold, silver, led, copper,
tin, and painted in that dark colour, now I remember
how it looked like him, I believe the statue of Serapis,
work of Bryaxis the Athenian, he must have known
something; we liked it a lot, handsome with the laurel
on his forehead, with the exquisite tiredness
flowing on his body, like a pentathlon winner who
appears naked after the events, just before he’d go
to the baths, among his close friends (winners
always have just a few friends or none).
Libros Libertad 