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Manuel Lozano
Gloomy Sunday
for Billie Holiday
Sundays yawn slack-jawed
like cattle skulls on garbage heaps.
What illusion is this of being wounded
to the last of my fogbound species?
(A puddle surrounds the bloody corpse,
bark scored with a runnel of ascending ants.)
Hang the empty flesh in plasters of anguish,
mooing like me before the desert void,
barely iridescent with witless death.
And where is the oracle cast,
the divine water of a god
clamoring for his gangrenous dream!
The wax melts between your teeth.
Astarte, my child What monster have you whelped?
A garland dangles from its beak.
Its wax is murky, denuded, veined with arteries.
Endless Sundays in a toad’s snout
overflow like coffins for moonless matrons.
Wherever can you evade your disguise,
your carriage boozing along
a throng of worms for your thighs?
He begged your spittle, meteor storms, flint stones.
On what bitter snack were your profiles engraved,
even as you ripped the splinters from your belly?
I have come to warn them.
For you have returned with your tinted mouth.
All Sundays have dazzling hooves,
leftover casseroles, asbestos forks,
saffron spoons/founts of wisdom,
crosses of straightened mirrors
above a recumbent child.
This voice burns from below.
As all the fairgoers know.
Paris, January 1996
Buenos Aires, March 2000
Adapted in English by Michael Robert White
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