That

That night
I took the hand by the cold of the fingers
and ran it gently over my lips
wanting to find the signs
of the last aborted cries
when even blood didn’t remember
the joy of marble
under tickling fear

Why, love?

All was quiet…

Corporal (Je T’Aime…)

The mouth’s fury, teeth:
the arms of passion
which explore and profane the intact skin

Luxurious flesh
toxic
love injects

The cold congealed on hand and wound
tingles in rebellion
forms a scar
between the possible breasts
of another triumph

Every three seconds then
two eyelids lubricate
the hostile eyes that don’t believe.

Poem for P. Thirty-One Years on the Way to Heaven

If death is a necessary incident
which penetrates me silent without fury
treacherous and uniformly cruel
with the sweat created at nights by the failure
of a body that knows its dominions
conquered by the ongoing
offence of facts.
And so the fear I no longer feel for you
will excuse my defeat.

V

What can I offer the one who attempts me?
Numbered days of inert passion
and eternal love always shared
with the debt owing to an existence
redeemed for usurious payments
conjugating the verbs “live” and “love”
in the first person plural
reduced to the forms of the present.

What can I offer the one who attempts me
if I’m a loose thread of the hope
Penelope weaves
and unweaves?

VI

Sleepless nights like damp sheets
in the circumvolutions of my brain
hung out in the wind of danger
eruption and eternal combustion
of another desired skin that would burn
in the flames its vision ignited.

Year after year I am a nest for
migratory birds
seeking warmer climates
in forced exile for the winter
conquered unarmed and captive
their wounded hearts perplexed
which pain tinges with a cold hatred.

One season in hell, another in
the temporarily pleasant, clear sky,
and at the end the sad pulchritude
of another dress rehearsal for the big sleep.

Translated from Galician by Jonathan Dunne