Selected poems from “Música i escorbut”

This wavering is like Venetian glass.
A heart of a shade of green, as though your gut
were gripped by waves of pain.
It’s an insolent colour, in autumn,
like a chunk of May, that has been removed,
stolen goods; for the heart is something
we don’t want given back to us.
A green that has gone on growing
all round a white as hard as a milk-tooth,
hard as a child’s crying caught on an answering machine.
White on green, like daisies
stiff with pride because they’re sharing death
with red carnations. Glossy white.
The white stucco of brides dressed in silver-coated white hair,
silver reasons like those of the star that the screwdriver borrows
from Cassiopeia. White and red blood, like the happiness
of a Sigismundo and his mahogany wardrobe
in a place without windows. (Before thinking
about what ‘window’ meant.) For windows are
rosy-red, because they come from ‘to smile’. Because if you’re happy,
you can be contented sorting plastic bags.
Don’t miss the next point: Can the bent guy make happiness
into a habit, as he did with sadness?
Or it will overcome the fear of going back to the same place
simply by always moving forward in a straight line.
What about fear, is it blue in colour?
Blue and yellowish like the middle of a bruise,
yellow as the pages of an old book, yellow as a bird’s thirst.
Yellow as jaundice in a newborn child. Cirrhosis yellow, cystitis yellow,
bilirubin yellow. The yellow of blue eyes
keeping watch on the golden yellow of this fear of mine,
the only treasure I own, the only light in that dark room
where they shut me when I wouldn’t finish my soup.
Such childish misery, and so pink!
So gum-pink, so lip-pink, so mark-of-fingers-pink
across the cheek or a slap that catches the chin.
If I need to, from blue and yellow I can always
go back to making that green with murky and clayey waters.
Green in the end, the apple green, emerald green,
of your call.