Song Of The Employee

We are dogs that abandon dogs.

We roam over trails reminiscent of the sound of swarms.
A better future does not await the gods.

I am going to die, and those are my lineages.

I have come to a place where beauty is measured in stones

from men who tell me;

I have come and I will stay until I draw a contour with particles

of the invisible;

a profile that declaims me: face, smell, vulva of thought.

I have come to give myself a name just before my eyes are

opened forever.

Because I was not born the daughter of aristocrats, although I

have a taste for the fruits of the sea and I sympathize with oats,

because I did not have the ability to deceive the merchants and

there is no forgiveness, because I knew the epidemics

they spread,

because I am going to die from an elementary illness and it will

be in the absence of heroes.

Something simple and terrible is happening:

hunger condemns, the cold condemns

there is a death before death and it is this commerce

to be saved from hunger and cold condemns and over

the hours a genocidal change transpires where life and

imagination lose their life.

Not as a child and I do not know how but I finally believed in

the necromancers shouting from the ridges of the city

that the heroic had died, and that passion is a tumor.

I’m going to speak for the girls who smell their hands and still

remember me

for the fisher boys who taught me how to seduce

the winds and to add their fury to my route

while they believed I spoke their language

while they believed in God and God in their favor

I’m going to speak for those of the irreparable encounter

and I’m going to speak for the lady with eyes from the

countryside and udders with eternal milk.

That is my mother.

They deserve this—that I pronounce my name before

extinction.

My keepsake will be the vine where the blind woman who

comes to seize me falls.

In image and likeness.

Girls, Mother, Kids, how do I warn you

she has a brightness that becomes essential in the time

it takes to make a mountain

she has a book where all flavors and a bird on the shoulder that

swallows a moan and spits out a map find their grave.

In the archway I describe in order to live there, in that slow

pirouette over stinking waters, that is my death.

III

Why me?

Or why not me exempt from this laceration by a bout of luck?

The only beautiful salvation is the one that is almost bereaved.

Only the seriously wounded understands salvation.

I would respond with a wormless joy of the new father

and the captain who finds fish

the one who expels its fluid and ignores himself for a moment

the gagged captive’s and everything was a simulation

the miner’s, who once again recognizes the sun

the abysmal joy of the animal in its being.

This papal bull I ask for is not good enough for the gold-

winning athlete—it is scorned by those who believe

in the work of men, and it is a disgrace to the leaders of

progress.

All of them filled with ire and reason, have their kingdom in this world

and their motives.

If something saves me, I promise the child’s gratitude for

his punishment, the gambler for his limits, the lunatic for

the heating.

But I know that nothing will absolve me; my parents are not

aristocrats and my soul distrusting of feigned vice

and of the stillness of yachts. Nobody will absolve me.

And I do not present myself as the Princess of Pleasures.

I know of no devices to use to fly higher, and there are days

when I can barely move.

I am not here to segregate myself from my neighbor, nor

so he embarrasses himself before the pearls of my blood.

My blood is only of a certain age and its color promises

fatigue and flows in pursuit of tenderness.

Forgive me. My crime is having understood how they drew

this misfortune.

The face is a disease, the consciousness a pandemic

and I only ask to die from my ills.

I ask for space to die.

I ask that they take the toys from the room, that light enters

and that no one distracts the panic from the walls.

I request a home for the transfiguration because only in it

do I appreciate the word house, I satisfy the seed

of silence and I begin to like the impassivity of trees.

If someone saves me from this death by workday, I promise

to identify him with my health.

If something liberates me from the evangelist of utility, I

promise to call it

cause of colors

dominion of the imagination

bread of the absent

liberty.

Translated by Curtis Bauer
“Song of the Employee” is from Los Heridos Graves [The Seriously Wounded] (Barcelona, DVD, 2005).

You can read and listen to the poem in the original Spanish here.

Julieta Valero

Song Of The Employee