A Riddle - Tedi López Mills

Now they kill them:

see the corpse

bloated in the ditch.

Now they banish them from the city:

see them running towards the tollbooth

hands intruding

in their shabby pockets.

Now they tempt them with commerce:

the virtual machinery

behind the world,

panting like a primordial motor

annihilated by the long and wispy

haze that hides the sun

with its snowy mask.

Now they whip them

with litanies of justice:

ancient and shattered by the snapping jaw

whose feverish bone

couldn’t wait to bite,

finally coming to rest in the light

rancor of its dust.

Now they silence them

with an unknown eloquence:

the sorcerer with his mouth full would do nothing,

would say nothing about the language

leaking from his eyeteeth

like a trobar clus

invented by the palate,

somewhere between yesterday’s brief phrase

and prayer’s most distant clause.

Now they stab them with epithets

in each airy pause:

“King of Haloes,”

“Soul’s Goblin,”

“Master of Goodness and Beauty.”

Now they exhaust them

with opaque ideals:

shadowy mirrors

lacking the sturdy tin frame

and the face enveloped by its gesture.

Now they heap them with prizes:

for a people’s honor,

for the obstacle course,

for dubious morality.

Now they hunt them and call for them

and sometimes break them at dawn

while they walk this field,

find a quiet place to hide,

pretending along with their fellows

as they always have,

no turbulence,

the thicket still in spite of the animals

fluently crossing the wasteland

as if it were an extension of their skins.

And then comes the worst,

comes the daily forecast,

its bread, its circus,

then generations and generations.

---

Tedi López Mills (born 1959) Mexico

Translated by Wendy Burk

Source: InTranslation July 2011

trobar clus - closed form (in poetry)