Hugo Claus - Even Now

She approaches in pleats and bolts,

In heat, in resin, in splashing,

While I, in a state of desire,

Extended like a rifle and

Ready to engage and kill,

Enclose, plough and fell,

Bending, kneeling, the heady animal

Between her leather-soft knees.

She splits my skittle

In the familiar warmth.

5

The husky night and the cart

Of time that drives into the night,

Rattling.

Your hair, the seagull nest.

The meerschaum hills in which,

Toothed, the fruit that splits.

The lizards, the stone woodpeckers

Swaying in the leaves,

In the furious leaves.

Hear the hooves of the horse Desire

Fleeing down the road.

Hear in the fields the moorcock, the hare,

The chattering teeth of love.

12

Her mouth: the tiger, the leap, the spinning top

Round and round to seven months of summer.

Her body: liana waiting to ignite.

A shell of wheat.

Flat is my white,

As white as a fish of stone.

I have been razed to the skin.

My population purged.

She has become someone else. Strange to my eye,

The one who lived in the scruff of my neck.

3

One leap

And I dived

Blind

Into the arms of a wind so bitter

The land let go its hold and I

Was impregnated by winter

And winter was the fury

Of my coagulating skin.

Darkness

Visited me

The blood

Of women asked and swiftly climbed and leapt

Into my backbone. And I became flesh and claw

And branch. Brittle

With desire I grew, a

Rider of the night-time

Strangers

Who I,

The animal,

Could no longer escape. In this season

Strangers

Are my life. Turning, they collapse,

As hot as women in the snow.

8

The night blows and beats its mutilated wings.

Rising from the uncertain earth the broken branch

Pierces my body.

Winter ends again and

No-one is mine.

From the avaricious woods,

The avaricious rats come riding through the grass.

12

Loneliness is a home.

(A home closes — warm

Lives a season in lodgings and

Becomes a face — soft

Is loneliness and ripens thought-

Fully from child to man and corpse.)

Don’t be like a home.

Love is a cramp and

(A murder) reaching for the

Moment: a dying executioner, a splitting conch.

Mirrors ripen. Don’t be like a mirror.

1

Over the rippled asphalt, through the steam

billowing from the grates,

three Black warriors carry a pink summer evening gown

like a senator’s wife.

On the concrete peninsula, in the bronze palaces

— drip trays for the growling jets above—

everybody buys the thinking man’s cigarette,

everybody chews their ground beef with nickel-plated teeth,

everybody washes in film-star milk.

What protects me from

this cannon fever?

A design around my left nipple

eloquently executed by Tattoo Joe,

the electric Rembrandt.

Under the crossword of concrete beams,

between the peroxide bitches

and the gastric ulcer advertisements,

besieged by the bells of salvation’s armies

contaminated by soot and sugar

and humiliated by insulted Negroes,

a greyer desire awakens

in every desire.

And whiter gentlemen greet me,

a stranger in their nest,

a friend and fellow pest.

There is reason here to hang,

reason enough, no one gives a dang

between forgetting and release.

A verse from Luke won’t help you here,

nor a leather dragon on your back

nor chewing on the almond herb.

I’ll be replaced here soon

by a mouth full of grit.

For nine days the lost donkey stood up to the buzzards,

now its remains are reeking on the roadside.

The sun, a stag that wants to catch the stars, those vultures,

doesn’t touch the riders,

begging by the wheels.

Girls who keep house in wooden boxes

make offerings to Jesus and Zapata.

On the way from Puerto Marqués to Oaxaca

I throw three hundred and eighty butts at wizened old men.

On the river sometimes when the strange weather

bursts into flame

a skeleton will sometimes creak

like a piece of furniture or a badly healed jaw.

This is what the natives hear. Unmoving.

Expressing no desires,

They ask no questions quickly shutting off, close-lipped,

they live in singular devastation.

Above the anthracite fields where Mayas

played ballgames in front of the House of the Dwarf

a vulture flicks its wing and swoops down on an anteater in the grass.

This is what we hear. And take photos of the prey.

Later we descend backwards from the Rain God’s altar

to avoid offending his eyes

and land in nettles.

(For the ladies every niche is dripping with phallic significance.)

We live in multiple bedazzlement.

1

Two horses in the hay, a grey and one with a blaze,

tied together and stamping,

a winter’s tale about that,

my memory of us already

homework for later days.

The contagion that transforms me

(a would-be hero becomes a shepherd

racing flames across the field)

distorts our gestures, animals and clouds.

In rooms I hear myself ask about before

and in the role of croaking judge

I speak of our old arbitrary horses

law and cancer.

2

Even if for you and me the world

has long been a domain of prickles and sponges,

we still ride down avenues.

Cured of stars but not yet addicted

to the manifold silence

we warm ourselves on the simple weather

and play in the hairy year

as if jumping at branches full of apples.

Playing, but dozens of horse flies from outside bite

and snitches from somewhere else cut me down to size.

“Look, a kite,” you say

and I see you burnt by phosphorus.

“Look, a beetle,” you say

and I see you crushed by a tank.

And beyond this, I sometimes think, you betray my voice,

but speaking without you is a plea to a mirror,

fleeing into the worst kind of wood.

Often you are my voice, you,

a trap for hare’s tails, a cuckoo’s egg,

you, my bed.

6

Sometimes, outside of your presence,

I want to slide silence into the tipping day,

delaying the dissipation.

But outside muddled circles

the dancer does not live.

In every room your fussing lies in wait

in every breath your hooks still try their luck

and you chatter away, my marsupial,

yes, you, who conjugates my misery

as sweetly as the verb to fuck.

Sleep tight tonight, milady,

and eat your dreams raw.

Tomorrow my marrowbones will be ready again

for your miraculous mouths.

You there on three legs, night is falling in the peaks,

an abyss is looming ahead

and will end your bitter drivel.

Seagulls still blow through your life,

but your shins are chalky

and your sowing is done.

No lamp in this debris, no watcher on the cliffs