To an old poet in Peru.
I mentioned the names of various cities, which are pre-Inca,
pre-Incaic, cultures of coastal desert Peru, where there
are many relics which are found by grave robbers who
open the sand in the desert of these necropolises
and take out the souvenir pots and skulls, hair.
Chancay, Pachacamac, Nazca.
They're all clustered in around Lima, Peru.
It's to an old poet in Peru named Martin Adan, who
was like an old reprobate poet, not exactly
a Maxwell Bodenheim.
He was a very great sonneteer, actually.
Now an old lush who didn't hang around with the literary crowd,
but made it in a bar next door to the presidential palace,
which was just seized two months ago by the Peruvian military.
Because we met at dusk, under the shadow of the railroad
station clock, while my shade was visiting Lima,
and your ghost was dying in Lima, old face,
needing a shave, and my young beard
sprouted magnificent as the dead hair in the sands of Chancay.
Because I mistakenly thought you were melancholy,
saluting your 60-year-old feet, which
smell of the death of spiders on the pavement.
And you saluted my eyes with your anisetto voice,
mistakenly thinking I was genial for a youth.
My rock and roll is the motion of an angel
flying in a modern city.
Your obscure shuffle is a motion of a seraphim
that has lost its wings.
I kiss you on your fat cheek once more tomorrow
under the stupendous Disaguaderos
clock before I go to my death in an airplane crash in North
America long ago, and you go to your heart attack
on an indifferent street in South America, both
surrounded by screaming communists
with flowers in their ass.
You, much sooner than I, or a long night alone
in a room in the old hotel of the world,
watching a black door, surrounded by scraps of paper.
Die greatly in thy solitude, old man.
I prophesy reward.
Vaster than the sands of Pachacamac,
brighter than a mask of hammered gold,
sweeter than the joy of armies naked,
fucking on the battlefield.
Swifter than a time passed between old Nazca night
and new Lima in the dark.
Stranger than our meeting by the presidential palace
in an old cafe, ghost of an old illusion, ghosts of indifferent
love.
The dazzling intelligence migrates from death
to make a sign of life again to you, fierce and beautiful
as a car crash in the Plaza de Armas.
I swear that I have seen that light.
I will not fail to kiss your hideous cheek when
your coffin's closed, and the human mourners go back
to their old, tired dream, and you
wake in the eye of the dictator of the universe.
Oh, another stupid miracle.
I'm mistaken again.
Your indifference, my enthusiasm.
I insist, you call.
Lost in the wave of gold that flows through the cosmos,
I'm tired of existing, insisting existence.
I'm tired of insisting.
Goodbye.
I'm going to Pucallpa to have visions.
Your clean sonnet?
I want to read your dirtiest secret scribbling,
your hope in his most obscene magnificence.
My god.
[MURMURING]
[APPLAUSE]