The Watchman in the Snow


The watchman was wounded by his mother;

his hands sketched the shape of sadness and he caressed hair that he no longer loved.

Every cause was eradicated in his eyes.

***

In his drunkenness, women, shadow, police, wind surrounded him.

He put veins in the purplish tree heath, vertigo in purity; the furious flower of hoarfrost turned blue in his ear.

Roses, serpents, and spoons were beautiful while they stayed in his hands.

***

He watched over the calm that stuck to the shadows, the circles where the parched flowers are deposited, the direction of the vine shoots.

Some afternoons, his indecipherable hand led us to the nameless place, to the melancholy of abandoned tools.

***

He impersonated a face in the air (hunger and ivory of Andalusian hospitals); in the extremity of silence, he heard the little bell of those in their final agony. He watched us and we felt the nakedness of existence. He used to open all the doors quickly and spill the wine over dawn's ice. Then, sobbing, he would show us the empty bottles.


***

Every morning he would pour steel and tears into the brooks and train birds in the song of wrath: a clear stream for the gentle half-wit daughter; blue water for the hopeless woman, smelling of vertigo and light, alone in the gutter amid white flags, cold beneath the willow, her eyelids already yellow with love.

***

He never gave up on his barren passion. Dogs sniffed at his purity and at his acid-scarred hands. At dawn, hidden amid the white wattle fences, he agonized before the highways, he saw the shadows entering the snow, the fog boiling in the deep city.

***

Shadows came, damp animals that breathed in his face. He saw fat glowing in lavender and black sweetness in terrestrial wine cellars.

It was celebration: light and saffron in white kitchens; from afar, beneath dusty garlands, faces in the sadness of carbide,

and its moaning among the remains of the music.

***

The wine was blue in steel (ah Friday's lucidity) and within his eyes. Gently, he distinguished the causes of infections: great motionless flowers and lust, the black ribbon in the silence of serpents.


***

In his song there were hopeless cords: a distant sound of blind women (barefoot mothers in the transparent prison of salt).

It sounded of death and dew; later, he played on black pipes; he became the singer of wounds. His memory burned in the country of wind, in the whiteness of abandoned sanitariums.

***

He ran swiftly over the white grass.

One day he sensed wings and stopped to listen in another age. Surely black petals were beating, but in vain; he witnessed the hard thrushes fly away toward the boughs honed by winter

and once again he ran swiftly without a destination.

***

He was wise in the prison of cold.

He saw omens in the blue morning: the sparrow-hawks sliced through winter and the brooks ran slow among flowers of snow.

Female bodies arrived and he sensed their fertility.

Then invisible hands came. With a precise tenderness, he seized his mother's hand.