Guitarra Negra (poema)

How will I take you into my insides, guitar
How will I make you feel my clumsy love
My desire to dream you whole and mine
How your flesh of air is touched, your fragrant touch
Your hungry heart, your silence on the bridge
Your fifth string, your dark and male drone
Your singing relatives, your three souls
Conversing like children

How can I love you without pain, without haste
Without witnesses, without hands that offend you
How to pass on my beloved men and women, guitar
My foreign loves, my certainty of loving you like few
How to give you all those names and that blood
Without flooding your heart with shadows, tremors, and death
With ashes, loneliness, anger, silence, idiotic tears

Today death walked looking through my books for something
Today in the afternoon, it walked among papers, finding out how I've been
How my life has been, how much time I wasted
How I wrote when there were greengrocers coming from the fields
When I had two girlfriends, a nice hairstyle, two pairs of shoes
When there was no television, that world at my feet
Violent, stupid, overwhelming, that scandalous novel written by a madman
Today death walked among my books looking for my past
Looking for the summers of '40, the boys under the hose
The clandestine naps, the neighborhood's bananas
Assassinated, carved in the soul
Today death walked reviewing my tram pass
My friends, their names, the Montevideo café nights
The parcels through the Onda with a stew smell
Reviewing my father, his Beretta, his Baldomir
Reviewing my mother, her hemiplegia, the Batllist Uruguay
My dear Aristides, my dear anarchists under the flag
Under shroud, under wines and endless verses
Today death walked reviewing the phone noises
Different under the index fingers, the photos, the thermometer
The dead and the living, the pale ghosts that inhabit me
Their multiple feet and hands
Their eyes and teeth, under suspicion of subversion
And found nothing
Couldn't find Batlle, nor my father nor my mother
Nor Marx, nor Aristides, nor Lenin, nor Prince Kropotkin
Nor Uruguay nor anyone
Nor the most recent Fernández dead
Nor me either
I had taken a bus to Cerro and was sitting next to life
I passed by the Nocturno and life had painted some posters
I asked on a corner for the time
And in the man's bag who told me the time
Life was there, along with his lunch
Today I will leave the doors and windows of my house open
And the night will enter through all the windows of my house
Through all the windows of the neighborhood
Through all the windows of all the barracks and all the prisons
Through all the windows of the hospitals
The night will enter, nodding, jumping inside
Shadow to shadow in the lamplight
And will lie on the floor like a dog
And will wait until dawn
Today
I will leave the doors and windows of my house
Open, forever
My heart is better placed than my house
My house, more fenced than my neighborhood
My neighborhood, surrounded by my town
In my neighborhood lives the President
Surrounded by an almost collapsed wall

Trembling, with the forehead split with the brown
By the brown one, it falls on its ribs, heavy as a world, the cow
Falls with a crash, face down on the cement
Bleating as its skeleton falls apart, now just a huge ribcage
Now just a poor hide and blood, half a ton of shattered bones
Stuck in all that trembling and astonished life
There it rises, like a heavy rag
Caught by the leg by a hook that jumps up
That lifts it by an eyelet opened in the hock with a knife thrust
In full sentimental stupidity
In the middle of half a ton of monstrous pain
Incomprehensible, absurd, bleating, lamenting and foolish
Like a beetle that doesn't think
While slowly meditates why it hurts so much
And why it hurts what part of who she is herself, the cow
Open to atrocious dismemberment everywhere
That had never hurt and were so many parts, so extensive
And that grazing had never hurt
Making milk, sperm, muscles, mane and leather and living horn
That were life itself flowing inwards
Vibrating tenderly like a warm Sun inwards
And had never hurt
It's already hanging
The front legs straighten, harden
And move forward and upward
Beseeching and fatally rigid
Ending in short hooves that a moment ago
Kneaded the mud of the yard, the manure of a hundred other bleats
Dinosaurs of the machine age, born to die from a blow
Now it's blue meat hanging in the fridge: Uruguay for export
That cow, who died from a blow, fell and shook the whole refrigerator
That other cow who received the blow on the forehead
Two fingers thick, while entering the tube suspiciously
Because there was no grass there, managed to understand there was another cow ahead
Bleating, being taken away by the hook
And fell behind, too, and the cement shook under those bones
That other cow, who dodged the blow and also fell
With a burst eye, a broken horn, shattered
Also fell and the earth trembled, the brown trembled, the brown one
The cow died trembling from pain and fear
From a blow to the forehead for export from Uruguay

At the tip of the water, a white, luminous flower
Worth fifteen dollars, sparks, bulges
Dissolves, drips among other smaller flowers
Cries, shakes, catapults it in a water jet
And rises like a ball in the air
It's always being born
While the water sings in that boite fountain
Among applause, to the orchestra's beat, soft white flower
Watery, nostalgic in the air
Risen in the applause like a spit, split, horned
Moans and cries in the night, throws stars dancing under the smoke
Reborn, cries for the blue-white jet of the fountain
As if it were the plant that raises it - and it's not-
And yet, it will continue to open, die, swell and float
As long as the night lasts, its childish beauty of engineering
Its soft heart under the fixed milky spotlight
The gringo, the water jet at a price
The imported air, those females, the waiter, those gentlemen

For a while now I've been giving work
And I've been getting used to the disuse of my soul
To the enemy's reason, to my sixty daily cigarettes
To the bad habits of my songs
Which somehow were always ours, you know, black guitar
Today I resume in a comic address yesterday's time standing in its nostalgia
The wings I put on to fly make me suffer
But I shout and they rise, I moan and they accompany me
I laugh and they beat in pairs, as if they were loving and hating each other
However, my two wings hate each other, straighten up
They become my friends to take me everywhere
There's the song, here's the nothingness
Beyond the town and closer the love
But the town is also closer
And before it was there too, behind the town the town
We have traveled through all my whims and the town hoeing the ground
Loving each other with wings like mine
Hating their destiny, hating and loving me without wings
With millions of feet, with hands and heads and tongues
And their thousand mouths say: Now, fate is cast

The butterfly comes towards me in the street
In the humid air, dancing through the humid air
Through the oppressive, ominous air, dancing in the hot air
And I saw that it wasn't me she was looking for but death
And I also saw she wasn't looking for death
Because she wasn't a butterfly from the iron city
Nor born for that, but she was just a butterfly
In the city, prey and already dead beforehand, fatally
Seeking in that crazy and fragile dance a wing
A grain, a pinch of pollen in the cement
Because the butterfly is born and learns nothing
Until it dies anywhere
Fatally wounded by its fair week
By its precise time, by its sip of life already drunk
That's not so sad
Sad is to see its chain of eggs in the soot
Deposited next to a river of oil
In the shadow of the high cement walls
Its chain of silk eggs

I am needed
I feel that life nervously stirs if I don't appear, if I'm not there
I feel there's a place for me in the line
That void is seen, there's a missing breath
I disappoint an expectation
I feel the unexpressed sadness or anger of the companion
The love of the waiting wounded
My face is missing in the town's graphic
My voice in the slogan, in the song, in the passion of walking
My legs in the march, my shoes treading the dust
My 7 eyes in the contemplation of tomorrow
My hands in the flag, in the hammer, in the guitar
My tongue in the language of all
The gesture of my face in my brothers' deep concern

How will I take you into my insides
Guitar, black guitar
Enrique says, my brother, that there's a certain sunken dog
That licks himself gently and licks us
Licking a quiet wound deep down there
Sitting on his step
And my other brother Enrique says, in Prague
He says that loving you with certainty, making you entirely female
Giving you what life my urgencies have
Will be to love Jaime more and more
To love him, more truly
For his soul, his own biting dog under the club
The cable, the punch, the burlap bag, the stake and the insult
The forgotten cheek that neither he nor anyone puts to hit
But with hunger and Rita and José Luis
With Gerardo and Raúl and Rosa and Sara and Mauricio
And for all our dead
And I have known, guitar, that this other dog you raised
Barking, peasant, sometimes gentle or vigilant
Chewing his own bone in the darkness and growling
Like almost every popular dog
Will wander through your wide paths, your bleeding tangos
Until he dies too
Maybe one day
Of loneliness and anger
Of tenderness
Or of some violent love
Of love
Without a doubt