Stalingrad

Stalingrad During moments I yearned for forests grown for me alone, Caressing them in a dream, I could sense the throbbing of the heart Hidden beneath my ribs to bless my journey. Summoning me with a pulse that he recognizes in me. I heard the noise of abandoned smoke from a moment of care Join with me, Forcefully traversing desires to the hidden-most one. My spirit swung toward him, Creating a tingling On lips that devour breaths alive. I felt ashamed, But the eye, In moments—I scarcely know what to call them—that took me on another route Toward the television, saw warplanes . . . spray death on them. At that moment, The fire of machine guns raked all the bodies, And another fire raked my body when I trained my eye on him Hesitantly inclining his head Toward a shoulder unaccustomed to the secret of the stars of war Or to insomnia. Oh . . . . I leaned on it! And when he caressed a dumbfounded person I felt his fingers like coiling embers inside me. Bashfulness seized the excuse this caress gave . . . and vanished, Eliminating distance till the two of us were one. And the eye—he moaned: May love not forgive her the eye—repeated another evasion Toward a drizzle of men flung about in the air by just the rustling of a pilot penetrating a building To fall on screens as the debris of breaking news. But his breaths . . . shattering the still down of the cheek, And turning their picture into mist as Eddies of the screen’s corpses . . . varieties of death that they brought them. The spirit that became a body, The body that was sold for the sake of a touch, The eye that was concealed in his image And that approached the firebrand of conflagrations. Everyone drawing close to everyone, Everyone, Everyone, Everyone. But the thunder of their machine guns splintered them: Corpses piled on corpses, I mean on me, The eyes of those in it were extinguished. They slept in a trench of silence. My eyes’ lids parted in a wakefulness obsessed with them. I rose … and embraced the chill That the screens brought me in commemoration of Stalingrad. Translated by William Hutchins