Symphony for fish in Sim Saima-Si mayor (B major)
For a long time I lay down
On my grandmother’s lap
Thinking of the long dreams of my youth.
In a tone of superstition and sukia
she —that beloved kuka—used to tell me:
“Son, is dangerous to travel by sea
The first day of the fullmoon
Especially in a “swollen-belly-of-quintuple-pregnancy” boat
Worse luck, son, is to
Travel in company
Of a reverend father
or
a reverend mother
Be it by air
Be it by sea.
Well, son,
You have to pray
Shall prayers take you
Shall prayers bring you.
Actually, son:
Horrible fish lurk
the shadows of the waters:
The bloodthirsty shark
With that deadly fin
As a periscope-submarine
Spying, spying and spying.
The grouper and the barracuda
Rolling our dreams
With that heavy air
Of Security Agent…
The sawfish —its tooth sharper
than a razor blade…
The swordfish
—Whale Executioner—
With that murderous scalpel
Shining like a shoemaker’s knife
That attacks and repels
With the impetus of D’Artagnan…
The glory of the starfish
And the seahorse
The one that splashed
For our great glory
son
Projecting towards the other
Blue face of the moon.
The sea is capable
To become hostile
Even with its own creator.
But at the end of the race, son
He also, like us,
Will appear shirtless
In front of the beaches
Of eternity
Smiling like a clown
After the applause “.
The only place
Where I’ve poured
Sincere tears
Without knowing exactly why
Has been against the bony lap
Of my paternal grandmother
And today before my departure
before my first fullmoon
Towards the salty kingdom of fish
I’ve done it again…
I’ve done it again
—with blooming eyes!
I knew then that
With my home-made luggage of dreams
Lying on my left shoulder
And some other X manufactures
Pulled over my right shoulder
I would have to go
Towards Zero
Among the grateful unknown
Where vocation and (a)vocation
wait me
Patiently impatient
To make One in me
for me
And despite of myself only for me.
The hour rushes and the water’s rising…
I kiss my grandmother.
I say goodbye.
I pick up my things and I’m leaving …
We moved away from the old Dock
Between good-bye-shaking-hands and handkerchiefs
Leaving behind some dry tears
similar to the ones of my grandmother’s
She’s stop on the fence of our house
Looking to the sea
With a cup of black coffee in the hand
And a couple of sentences
Swinging over her lips.
The twilight was laying its last drops on the rudder of the boat.
Some fishing birds were flying by the coast
Dodging the first flutters of the night
Descending on the deep.
There are so many eyes swollen by recent tears
Looking out here
On this Sea, which has the color of sadness
That don’t let me forget that girl
I leave behind in this town so close to the water…
Again
The act of going away from my home
leave me with a sea-flavor in my heart.
The sea is tamable only in thoughts.
From the beginning its waters have come trampling on sacred things.
Something divine must happen someday.
On its waves still persists the solitude of fish
For the time comes for the dead-by-water
And I am out here on this fish playing field
so many miles away from the sin of the cities
I must always recognize myself less noble than this body of water
Although I feel so close to God today in the liquefaction of my feelings.
Who probably awaits me today
at the shadows of the fish
the Glu-glu of the drowned
Accompanied by the last bubbles
throwing things conquered by water.
So we went to the sea
At the moment when this
Barely moved
with a slow eastern rhythm
And the breaking sound of its waves
left a couple of champagne-alleyways scattered like white flowers
over a dark desert
In adoration only to the surface’s Mamon…
…and we arrived during dawn
on the first day
of my first fullmoon, riding waves
With music from radios
Lovers hugs
Metal laughter
And animated songs of MayPole with guitars in prow & guitars in port.
(Some of their eyes were still fresh
by the sensual contortions of that black woman
that Beautifully was wiggling the hips and
the belly regions like the waves of the sea
The one that never failed a single MayPole
In her 15 years of simsaimasimalo.
When the appendix burst
We went to the hospital to bring her flowers
Canned Orange Juice
And a small “Get Well Card”
With an English caption —of course—).
All the morning of the second day of my first fullmoon
was mine to rehearse
My eternity against the sea.
In that moment I wanted
That my eternal hours would become
A single universal cry
Of water roses and snail languages
launched against all possible beaches
Of this wormy globe
And as the same way in which the waters retreat back to their channels
someone like me would keep on contemplating my fleshless remains
Said with a newspaper gesture:
This one loved too much.
He suffered from women.
He died of present because he could not forget the past.
The future owes nothing to him:
Well instead of life
He Chose mankind.
It was black but mostly
Lived a poetry more interesting than his own skin.
Entering the night. We enter into fear
On frenetic waves of go—go
With the small hysterical compass toward the horizon
That goes up and down faster
Than the heartbeat of the sailor.
Fury and savagery in ecstasy of waves and foam
Destroying and re-incorporating from their own wreck.
But, what is the truth?
That the waves crashes against the boat
Or the boat’s crashing against the waves?
The reality is that both are heading towards / or des
Meeting each other on their respective arrivals.
But all
All of this was enough
For anyone to feel
in Exile —arbitrarily
Under the last dying ashes of the round and opaque moon
or
To imagine that one’s Stark among the fish
Like a dead animal
With broken bones taken as a souvenir
For those underwater monsters
Which the film producer has not yet discovered.
The mischief and the daring of the elements must continue.
All this ripple and all these movements must continue.
I know cold-blood sailors with tokens from all the seas
they have tell scary stories
Of adventures they have had in the hottest corners
Of these mule kicks
And how they have pray to God
Requesting an appointment
At any meeting point on a Neutral sea
just to sign a truce pact
or one of peace.
I have seen men cry as children misplaced from the breast.
I have seen men envying the flight of planes and rockets.
I have seen men praying like saints in the hour of danger.
But all this rivalry of atoms and time
Have to be fallow
by the stupidity and falsehood
Of these machines with memory placed between us.
For this boat is just a matter of waves
Foam
For the continuity of days —water and snails rumors.
Instead
Kisses and hypocrisy
Have to follow
Here with those who are actually a little bit
Lower than the angels
Just to check
That at the end we are
The only pure semen
That would immortalize
The true Age of mankind.
…We are the race of POETS
Known only among the others
For our little names of men
But we are brothers
That populate everything of poetry
Cities with poetry names
Inventions with poetry names
Sports with poetry name
Events with poetry name
Suicides with poetry name
Murders with poetry name
Wars with poetry name
Sins with with poetry name
Poems with poetry name
We also have to die
Even if we sing
In our chains
like the sea.
On the last of the three days of my first fullmoon
On this piece of time relegated of liquid
I heard how did the boat engine again
Accompanied by the music of a noisy radio
Surrendering at once to the vagaries of the sea.
With the same intensity of my first,
second and third movements over the indomitable
today I want to verify in front of the beaches of my town
A single universal rite of waves and foams
And a boat over the sea
And that someone is there contemplating
From the place of my absence of the ravine
Facing the sea although the rest of the Town
is giving the back
The hope of a large generation
If we measure it by the time
that takes to a sea
To get in shape
for eternity.
It is on the sea
Where should we look at
If we know
The true age of man
Ignored for so long
Between two drops of water
Housed in the mystery
Of two nostrils
without noise without time…
The other night when the sea was calm
The wind was blowing
The song of a thousand:
“Rinqui – Tinqui – tin
All dem Gial de rinquitinquitin”
Softly above
From the roofs of my town.
The Sim – Saima – si-maloo
Was the first crow’s song towards the dawn.
The joy of the fish was ours.
And all of our teeth
stayed in a straight line.
September 6th 1968