Café Blanche

Believing the best cure for melancholy
was those radiant, wide open surfaces
you went to the memorable ruins
and saw the basalt statue
they made of Antonio’s body.

Greece bore witness, beneath that lavish
cruel light, to how only external things
have their own life.

Ethics and beauty
were one and the same.

Sculpting the body was
sculpting also the soul.

Curing self-hate
meant curing loneliness.

Home again, free now of the past,
wearing those shirts in loud colors
your black pants with three tucks
your pointed Havana shoes
your bare chest showing the solid gold
chain and the five medallions
you would go into the Blanche and spend the nights
drinking rum and coke and burning joints.

All the girls and boys were yours.

You fell in love, no doubt.

You loved so much the rites of the flesh
its language and its words
that even now, as you write
you still feel no interest
in the “last act”.

Traslated from Spanish by Rowena Hill