Providence

(excerpts)

Rafael Castillo Zapata (Caracas, 1958)





When will we build a pyre with these dark branches and with these thorns, when will we chop up your forehead with axe blows imitating starving invaders?










I love the word lámpara associated to your future. Won’t I see you shine, perhaps, beneath the stars, rescued from your shrouds like a nocturnal bride? Surrounded by bonfires, by flames, your face will light up when your stretched limbs are shaken in the dance. Won’t I see your calves burn like firewood consumed in the fury of the party? Won’t I see you drink until exhaustion? Won’t I see you happy, giving yourself at last to he who marries you, patient groom who receives you so as to renew himself with your blood sleeping beside you?










You'll go uncombed, Providence, torn by the wind. You'll go on showing your meats under tablets and the flowered tapestry. Your soul will be on display. Your cornices will become like fringe on a worn suit. Your granite and your painted timbers (red and saffron) will be useless to you. Your blackboards and your asphalt are useless. I will watch you naked, stranded, thrown aside, and I will embrace you loudly, with rage. You will be mine after no one offers anything for you. Ah, your smile, between chapped lips, will be my reward, your gift of straw, your perfume, your desolation.










What will become of you until dawn? Who will sustain the night's weight with you so it doesn't squash you under its domain?

Stone Rose: may nothing crack you like a vanquished bone. Serve yourself from my hands. Rest beneath the bridge of my arms. Be mine, naked. With our backs turned away from the lightning.










The night and his inverted bonfires have fallen. He is contemplating you, Providence, clearing a path through your spine-thickened forests. Their lights will guide me better than lamps. Toward your furthest shore.










How long have you turned your back to the sea that nibbles your ankles offering you his mouth? How long has it been since you forgot the smell of salt, the black-green rust of his seaweed, the dark invitation of his groans?

I see you from a hill. As if trailing a shipwreck, your wooden planks rot on a grey beach full of dead shrubs and shells.

When will you rise from your sadness, Providence? When will you respond to the insistent smile of the water that barks at you?










The collapsed sky enhances you, Providence. I watch you as much as I can under that light until I tire and mistake your face in its mirage.

I don’t know if you’re really there; if you’re still you; but I love you.

As if under an obliging lamp your signs hidden under the day suddenly reappear, for an instant, and I recover you, pure, fighting the growing night for that unexpected piece of splendor.










I didn’t let myself be confused by your forests, which were calling me with their claws drawn.

I looked for your face amidst everything.

The darkness was not there.










Once again the sky plucked a furious bird over your cornices, Providence. He mocked you. He pierced the air deeply with that already frozen body, he twirled it and scattered a whirlwind of glass at the edge of your throat. Didn’t you hear how that avalanche shook under my steps, while it opened little rivers of blood over the flesh of your name?










All this snow spread out. Such a waste of cloth to cover the sleeping woman who remains silent. To the drowsy woman. To the one made of stone. To the woman married to silence under a handful of dark brambles and branches. Abandoned by the birds. Pale. Bloodless. Unknown.










I’ll move along the edges. Through the hinges where night gives in. Like an animal lit up by the furtive hunter’s lamp, I’ll trap you amidst your shock. Nothing will return you when dawn comes.










This leisure to which you’ve given your hands, without parties, until renouncing your own self, without the memory of your own feelings, robs the light from you in the closing midday’s quicksilver. It relegates you to the shadows as lightning grows in your entrails.

Your loosed hair falls like a dead body.

Your birds, asleep, have forgotten you.










Sleeping fingers await the blood's river beneath cotton.










When will I reach your lips’ vein? When will I finally be able to kneel down there exactly, where your blood buds and your throat’s pale stone lets out smoke to touch the wood of your flesh, beneath whose crust life pulses, darkly, subterranean.










Herds of green stumbling with pollen deserts and multitudes will lift their dark-wood skirts and your tiles, Providence, and you'll unveil your thighs, the skin of your knees bitten by the birds, your ashen ankles washed by the water from the beaches. Storm winds. High Tide.










Rafael Castillo Zapata, Providence (Caracas: Angria Ediciones, 1995).