SALVADOR NOVO
Translated from the Spanish by Rigoberto González


FOR MEXICO CITY / INTERRUPTED POEM / ELEGY

FOR MEXICO CITY

Mexico! Capital! City of crowds
where proud
Flora flaunts her greatest paradise.
If I toast to her don’t be surprised,
she is my native city, my birthplace,
where I first felt sunlight on my face!
What grand museum, my city;
everywhere I see
cars, carriages, trucks, the roads
to a thousand schools and private homes,
for my people, young and old,
move among them, science and affection to behold.
But human tongue cannot describe
such pleasure that I feel inside
my city; you may think that I exaggerate
but it’s the truth; and just in case
you want more proof, take
a journey to my land by train
and you’ll see it’s no mistake
what has been spoken here to you by one
                                                       Salvador Novo.

[reverse]

INTERRUPTED POEM

Even now in writing, I’m doing something different.
I told myself: I must write a thoughtful poem
and I should speak within it all my pain
before the evidence of my aging.

I should dampen it in tears
of eyes that see without the hope
that life gives lovely fruits
and that then go to the mirror
to reflect a bogus smile
and a clumsy body without grace.

These eyes that imprison crystals
that tire in the cages
of lines inside books.

This mouth bitter with smoke and lies
that withers on its own from thirst.
These hands that pick up pencils, that reach
for another pair of needy hands,
that knot my tie and secure my confinement.

The cost of youth is a pinch of gold,
tomorrow at the expense of today,
today at the expense of yesterday,
a blessing at the expense of a kiss,
greetings at the expense of bliss.

[reverse]

ELEGY


Those of us who have hands that don’t belong to us,
too grotesque for a caress, useless for the workroom or the hoe,
long and flaccid like a flower bereaved of seed
or like a reptile that offers up its venom
because it has nothing else to give.
Those of us who have a guilty or embittered look
from which the unfinished death of the world peers out
and which glows a smile that freezes before the naked statues
because it will never close itself around gold rings
or give itself over like a torch over the horizons of time
on a night whose dawn is but this noon
that flagellates our skins at times ripped out forever.

Those of us who have rolled through the ages like a rock broken off from Genesis
over the grass or among the undergrowth in unbridled rush
to remain unstoppable and never go back to what we were
while men ascend with difficulty
and sprout other hands from their own to bend the direction of the winds
or to weave themselves tenderly.

Those of us who dress bodies with old suits,
for whom theft is enough or the alms of a crumb that is all bread and only Host,
we have arrived at the shores of the centuries that go by our anguished hearts
and we will never see with clean eyes
another day like this one when all the music in the universe
becomes a voice that doesn’t listen to anyone among the empty words
and in the dream without water.

[reverse]