walk like an inca

Tall city of stones stacked up in steps,
at last a dwelling where what is earthly
was not hidden under slumbering clothes.
In you, like two parallel lines,
the cradle of lightning and humanity
rocking together in a thorny wind.

Mother of stone, spume of the condors.

Highest reef of the human dawn.

Shovel buried in the first sand.

This is the spot, the place where they lived:
here the fat kernels of corn were carried up
and fell again to earth like red hail.

Here the gold wool came off the vicuña
to dress the loves, the burial mounds, the mothers,
the king, the prayers, the warriors.

Here men’s feet took their rest at night
next to the feet of eagles, in the lofty lairs
of the meat-eaters, and at dawn
they trod with thunderous steps over the rarefied fog,
and touched the ground and the rocks
until they knew them in the dark or in death.

I look at their clothes and their hands,
the traces of water in the echoing hollows,
the wall worn smooth by the touch of a face
that looked with my eyes a the earthly lamps,
that oiled with my hands the vanished
timbers: because everything –the clothes, the hides, the vessels,
the words, the wine, the bread was
gone, fallen into the earth.

And the air came in with orange-blossom fingers
over all the sleepers:
a thousand years of air, months, weeks of air,
of blue wind and iron mountains,
as if soft hurricanes of running feet
were polishing the solitary enclosure of the stone.

……

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays–
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.

Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.

Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.

Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.