The poem I'm going to read, "Nocturnal Collection,"
is a poem about sleep.
It's a nightmare narrative.
It's surreal, and it has about as rich
and sustained a collection of images
as any poem I think I've ever read.
The translation is by Ben Belitt.
"Nocturnal Collection."
I had vanquished that angel of sleep, allegorical mourner.
But his travail went on, and its ponderous football
came closer sheathed with snails and cicadas, seaborne
and brackish, smelling of fruits.
Wind rattles the months.
A train whistles.
Fever paces the bedpost, a hard intonation of darkness,
like a bottomless downfall of patches.
Distance repeated, wine in a nondescript color,
the dusty approach and the balling of cows.
Sometimes the black of his basket falls hard on my chest.
His conqueror's pack cuts my shoulder, all
his legions of brine.
The armies deploying by halves, overturning the heavens,
overtaking the things of the sky.
His breathing goes at a gallop.
His step is a kiss.
His infallible salts bind the eye
with the might of their essences his somber intent.
He enters his providence there like a master, sombusly robed
in his substances, suddenly whole.
He engenders prophetic foods without quarter.
His campaigners have often been known to me
with their weapons corroding in air, their immensity.
So savage their passing for space
he has harried my heart's depths in search of it.
He rules the uncharted plateaus, has danced
with the doomed and the usual.
His aerial acids break into my flesh in the night.
And I hear in my entrails his instrument stir.
I listen for a dream of old play fellows, women beloved,
and then rent by the shock of my dreaming.
Speechless, I tread on the pile of the carpets
or bite on the blaze of his poppy transported.
Oh, you slumbering dead who so often have
danced with me, caught to the weight of my heart
toward what lust of the cities we journey.
So with the damp of this birth pain,
with the shadowy symmetry like a wine cellar padlocked, the air,
too, is criminal.
Sad crocodile colors the wall and the sinister weft
of the spider. We tread over pulp like a carrion monster.
Black grapes hang adornments of bloating of juices clogging
the ruins like wine skins.
Captain, whatever our reckoning, slip the mute
latches and wait for me there.
We must feast in our funeral clothing.
A malarial patient stands watch by the doors.
Love that grows late and the shorelines are lost.
A day, like a tatter of tablecloth drying,
flaps in a circle of lives and extension.
All things that live give some part of themselves to the air.
Intent upon atmosphere, keeping close watch
come the beggars, the lawyers, the gangsters, the postman,
the seamstresses, a little of every vocation
a humbled remainder that works towards some destined
completion within us.
I have looked for it long, vanquished no doubt
by the evenings and go on with no arrogance.
That's an approximation of what that form is.