Elegy

Like a censer filled with desires,
you pass through clear evening,
flesh dark as spent spikenard;
your face pure sex.

On your mouth, dead chastity’s
melancholy; in your womb’s
Dionysian chalice the spider weaves a barren veil
to hide flesh spurned by living roses,
the fruit of kisses.

In your white hands
the twist of lost illusions,
and on your soul a passion
hungry for kisses of fire,
and your mother-love dreaming distant
pictures of cradles in calm places,
lips spinning azure lullabies.

Like Ceres, you’d offer golden corn
to have sleeping love touch your body;
to have another Milky Way
flow from your virgin breasts.

You’ll wither like the magnolia.
No kisses burnt on your thighs,
no fingers in your hair,
playing it like a harp.

Woman strong with ebony and spikenard,
breath white as lilies,
Venus of the Manila shawl tasting
of Malaga wine and guitars!

Black swan on a lake of suet
a lotuses, waves of orange
and spray of red carnations scenting
the withered nests beneath its wings.

Andalusian martyr, left barren.
Your kisses should have been beneath a vine,
filled with night’s silence,
stagnant water’s cloudy rhythm.

But below your eyes circles start,
and your black hair turns silver.
Your breasts ease, spreading their scent
and your splendid shoulders start to stoop.

Slender woman, meant for motherhood, burning!
Virgin of sorrows;
forever hopeless heart
nailed by every star of the deep sky.

You’re the mirror of an Andalusia
sulfering and stifling great passions,
passions swaying to fans
and mantillas at throats
shivering with blood, with snow,
red scratch-marks of gazing eyes on them.

Like Ines, Cecilia, and sweet Clara,
you go through autumn mists, a virgin,
a bacchante who’d have danced
in garlands of green shoots and vine.

The great sadness floating in your eyes
tells us your broken, shattered life,
the monotony of your bare world,
at your window watching people pass,
hearing rain fall on the bitterness
of the old provincial streets;
far away, a troubled clash of bells.

But you listened to the air’s accents in vain.
The sweet serenade never reached you.
Behind your windows still you look and yearn.
The sadness that will flood your soul
when your wasted breast discovers
the passion of a girl new to love.

Your body will be buried
untouched by emotion.
A dawn song will spread
across the dark earth.
Two blood-red carnations will spring from your eyes,
and from your breasts, snow-white roses.
But your great sadness will join the stars,
a new star to wound and outshine the skies.