LUDWIG ZELLER
The following is a short selection from the piece originally published on pages 28-38 of Issue 29.4.
ELEVEN POEMS
by
Ludwig Zeller
From Passing Through the Sun
From passing through the sun my bones are
Covered with soot. You no longer know who I am.
At least turn your face my way,
I’ve fallen
into dust.
My blood’s mixed with ashes. Being forgotten will be cold.
Perhaps you were right. I love you, you told me,
I want to be flame enveloping you.
Then you closed.
My hands wore away beating on those doors
Sealed up. And now it’s late. Can you
Hear it, the deluge? Just imagine–it’s begun.
Laughing, I Told My Dream
to Susana Wald
for her painting on the same theme
Laughing, I told my dream: a huge bird carried me
Back to my childhood desert. It was dark and the Bird
Was descending to the salt flats in the Valley of the Moon.
Everything there glowed from within and in front of us,
Boiling like the lines in my palm, a wall stood,
The prodigious wall that reaches up to the sky.
A woman, staring into my eyes, came near and said,
I’ve been waiting centuries for you; go back to the beginning
Of beginnings, penetrate into this wall where Life is trapped
And gestated.
I felt a tom-tom thrum in my ears,
I advanced against the wall, skin of mist, sweetness
Of the deepest dream, the one that carries us
To her, the Many, the Adored, she whom the wind kisses.
I’ve never come back. I don’t know why I’m at this table
Covered so deep in feathers, names, and petals,
Laughing among you, answering your questions absently.
Understand that, as I tell my dream I am still there.
"La cola es al collage..."
to the poet Juan Jorge Bautista
I’ve cut up all the papers. I’ve arrived
At that border of age from which one looks back on the disaster.
Everything is spilled on the ground, the knives and colours and papers,
Waiting for me to return with a knot of fever from my pillow
And permanently glue a bird’s foot to the moon,
A sun to an eye, a green to a yellow.
Dust falls. Scratching and scratching, I find the beatific
Señoras, their hats and stockings, their underthings of soft leather.
What goddamned garbage!
All those ladies moth-eaten in their tombs,
Seeds of another sun: the engraver gave them one more century
And I see them passing through their pages
In an old book, other Beings, almost the same butterflies as once.
The scissors don’t judge. They cut out inked scraps and the scorpion those women
Kept hidden between their thighs leaps out.
Now they don’t remember,
They’re only half-machine half-female things. They show their hearts
Through the plumes of a fan time flutters.
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