Gerardo Deniz

Evasion

There are many asylums in Tlalpan.

And to see in the waiting room those old French volumes

so thick

with arsonvalization and hydropathic treatment,

to cross that garden where three times a week narrow-track philosophies

roam

--tragical dogs squashed on the highway as we dash off,

and that's how we'll have to pass by now.

                                                            It's hot out.

Whoever goes, at the sentimental hour, like all, marching down the railway in the dark

will be able to listen (if they care to do so) to the buzz of swarming beetles

very much in love

between the cliff's rocks.

Beyond (supposedly) rest wealthy teenagers with emaciated limbs

and dry lips, laid out to oblivion

like stretched civet-cats.

(Have they eaten beans?

Will they erase, as one should, the impressions their bodies left on the bed? O risk.)

Yet this world of trains and beetles is a world of trains and beetles,

and although it is,

nagara.

tr. Mónica de la Torre 

fr. Gerardo Deniz: Poemas/Poems [Mexico City: Ditoria / Lost Roads Publishers, 2000]