José Emilio Pacheco
Translated by Amanda Rivkin


The Fire at Rest

1.
Nothing disrupts the disaster: the abundant
grief of blood fills the world.
Edge of what imminence, or perhaps the border
of wind dawns and waits for us?
With a grim rumor
the air descends
and falls, excessively sad,
into the greatest stony bonfire
and abandons itself.

And the leaf in the air, such sadness, the bonfire
contemplates the incendiary thirst of time,
it's eve of ruin, the songs
of the pale and tremoring cities.
What a blue peninsula, what unevenness
in the flames penetrating the night.

7.
The dictator, the almighty,
the constructor of the deserts sees
how the various acids of death
are born from the body and how it is worn out
by this furious martyr, with which
the years of swarms pushed it towards the abyss,
the miserable pit where its skeleton smokes
and anticipates the fight.
Sometimes he listens to the punitive rats
run below the palace while preparing
for birth on the floor and ferociously
destroy how much they want.
And the worms,
envious of the mole, weave silk:
the voracious certainty of the shroud.


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