I

With the antipodal lights of the air,
The batting of darkness's eyes;
The sun resides amidst culverts:
The sun, of grimacing laughter,
The sun, of sulphurous sheets,
The bazaar of the redheaded clouds
By winter's wicker hands sown.
The sky, in decapitated light,
Ignites, proclaiming red syllables;
Life is not a poem about landscapes,
It is the cobra of fire of death,
The darkness's certified post.
But we live bereft of the scalpel
That lances the schwingmoor: imago mundi
In the instant, not its succession,
But hanged from the ignited flint,
On the concave cuirass of air.
Che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta
We never believe it: the villa
With the phosphorescent loggia
Is only a glimmer in our eyes,
Like the light of the wind in Compostela,
Like the garden of gargoyles and spirits,
Like the white-horned sky's disarray
In the night of ferruginous lime;
Let us pass through the burnt air to heaven,
Let us pass through yesterday's mist;
The day has reaped its tarantulas
Engulfed by the light's condescension:
Drawn up in themselves, the storm clouds
Prolong not, but gather the air,
Like life in a coffer of snowflakes,
As in the inertness of years;
We feel the wind in our groin,
A friend's voice echoed back in carved stone,
The blind cavalcade of Tiresias.
Unreal City, but city of escutcheons:
Escutcheons of pomp borne aloft,
Hothouse in eyeless combustion.
Thus the ice foresaw the bonfire, wavering:
Thus death stalked the springtime of life.