THE GATE
(Excerpt 11)
Ah, old angry women
with the big pumps for spraying insects, wide gestures
in the darkness with no purpose, night after night
old women-nights — with their black dyed hair,
nostrils,
tongues, armpits, black cartons glued with flour glue
ah, the flesh dies last; the body works
opposite time, opposite death
body, the inside of the body —
don’t you hear the voices of the construction workers
the pounding of the stone, old women —
with clubs, legs of chairs, rattles, butcher’s knives,
legs of the bed, metal rods, pestles,
soldiers urinate outside of your windows,
shaven heads, unshaven down there.
She sat at the stairs to catch her breath, wide spread
legs showing her panties; whores, she shouted,
I was younger than you, you’ll become older than me;
I more whore than you, whoever had enough? Let
him come and confess;
let the crippled ones go to sleep; they can’t understand
out of ten pieces nine are ours, the magician said it too;
they whipped his back nine times, whores, whores, yet
he’s still upright.
Let me look through the hole of the wall, let me strike
the wall and make a hole, to throw down the salt cellar,
the honey jar; honey and salt so I get glued on it; in
the kitchen I have clean pieces of bed-sheets, shirts
to wipe yourselves and wipe them too, whores, whores
bigger whores than myself.
Libros Libertad 