Boston Review

Have no Pity on Me

Smoke morass

The rupestrine images of the unknown
untwist their laugh’s silent twilight
toward me

Smoke o sea–urchin heart’s morass
the dead stars calmed marvelously by my hands
spurt out of
the pulp of my eyes.

Smoke smoke
the brittle obscurity of my voice crackles
with cities blazing
and the irresistible purity of my hand calls up
from afar, very far, the victorious acid zeal
of the ancestral inheritance in
the flesh of life–morass–

such a viper born of the dazzlement’s
blond force.

—translated by Colin Dayan