Where does weariness comes from? The sky outside, which can’t make Up its mind to be blue or black?

I am not journeying. I have to make A canoe for myself after I fell this tree With my pen and paddle my life up

The river, dodging the anacondas And various kinds of malarias, as I drag my dog like skin to where Maria

Stands and shivers. Her son meanwhile Is the silent sentinel over our harbor, Street children and the death squads.

What a miracle indeed it is to be alive! In the streets tonight a woman wraps Her leg around a man’s torso. Tango

Enables them to fall into each other, Mad flamingoes that seem to lash The evening twilight with their necks.

From the cafes spill yellow lights, pressed Out of the distilled grapes and knifes That glint as they slice the meat.

They have even announced the dates Of the carnival and you want to dance macarena. Only where does this weariness come from?

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day, on some day I can already remember. I will die in Paris--and I don't step aside-- perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself with all the road ahead of me, alone.

César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him although he never does anything to them; they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

with a rope. These are the witnesses: the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms, the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. . .

All that is left of this morning’s downpour, Are little specks of water congealed on These tall window panes that overlook Taller trees, now pulsing and dark green.

Then what makes you, O heart, turn Insistently to this past dry winter Where the only echoes in your chambers Were of bare branches and meager leavings

Of her passages, back and forth, in and out of your tunnel of sight, sheaves of her hair strung out like that season’s dark and her galleon like body yawing in the cold?

You don’t answer me. Thus the reason for your hankering after this remembrance remains as obscure As the weatherman’s prediction of rain this afternoon Or the opening and closing of a swallowtail butterfly’s wings!