L'étranger - pg. 40

Les lampes de la rue se sont alors allumées brusquement et elles ont fait pâlir les premieres etoiles qui montaient dans la nuit.

A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook

Primroses; salutations; the miry skull

of a half-eaten ram; viscous wounds in earth

opening. What seraphs are afoot.

Gold seraph to gold worm in the pierced slime:

greetings. Advent of power-in-grace. The power

of flies distracts the working of our souls.

Earth's abundance. The God-ejected Word

resorts to flesh, procures carrion, satisfies

its white hunger. Salvation's travesty

a deathless metaphor: the stale head

sauced in original blood; the little feast

foaming with cries of rapture and despair.

The Distant Fury Of Battle

Grass resurrects to mask, to strangle,

Words glossed on stone, lopped stone-angel;

But the dead maintain their ground --

That there's no getting round --

Who in places vitally rest,

Named, anonymous; who test

Alike the endurance of yews

Laurels, moonshine, stone, all tissues;

With whom, under license and duress,

There are pacts made, if not peace.

Union with the stone-wearing dead

Claims the born leader, the prepared

Leader, the devourers and all lean men.

Some, finally, learn to begin.

Some keep to the arrangement of love

(Or similar trust) under whose auspices move

Most subjects, toward the profits of this

Combine of doves and witnesses.

Some, dug out of hot-beds, are brought bare,

Not past conceiving but past care.

It's still early ...

from The Monogram

[...]

That I no longer have anything else
In the four walls, the ceiling, the floor
To shout for you and my own echo hitting me
To smell of your scent and people to get angry
Because the untested and foreign
People can’t stand and it’s early, do you hear me
It’s still early in this world my love

To speak of you and me.

[...]

Oblivion: Mr. Squishy

Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the context of the mystery of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his childhoos catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium's picture window when he got home at night and instead sat with his satellite TV's channel changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider's 220 regular and premium channels and that he was about to miss it, spending three nightly hours this way before it was time to stare with drumming heart at the telephone wholly unbeknownst to her had Darlene Lilley's home number on Speed Dial so that it would take only one moment of the courage to risk looking prurient or creepy to use just one finger to push just one gray button to invite her for one cocktail or even just a soft drink over which he could take off his public mask and open his heart to her before quailing and deferring the call one more night and waddling into the bathroom and/or then the cream-and-tan bedroom to lay out the next day's crisp shirt and tie and say his nightly dekate and then masturbate himself to sleep once more.

Distant Star - pg. 130

This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters/ Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published.

Inferno - Canto I

As when Divine Love set those beautiful
Lights into motion at creation's dawn,
And the time of day and season combined to fill


My heart with hope of that beast with festive skin --
But not so much that the next sight wasn't fearful:
A lion came at me, his head high as he ran,


Roaring with hunger so the air appeared to tremble.
Then, a grim she-wolf -- whose leanness seemed to compress
All the world's cravings, that had made miserable


Such multitudes; she put such heaviness
Into my spirit, I lost hope of the crest.
Like someone eager to win, who tested by loss


Surrenders to gloom and weeps, so did that beast
Make me feel, as harrying toward me at a lope
She forced me back toward where the sun is lost.

Distant Star - Opening

I

I saw Carlos Wieder for the first time in 1971, or perhaps in 1972, when Salvador Allende was President of Chile.

At that stage Wieder was calling himself Alberto Ruiz-Tagle and occasionally attended Juan Stein's poetry workshop in Concepcion, the so-called capital of the South.

"What star falls unseen?"
WILLIAM FAULKNER

For Victoria Avalos and Lautaro Bolaño

Copyright 1996 by Roberto Bolaño and Editorial Anagrama
Translation copyright 2004 by Chris Andrews

Published by arrangement with the Harvill Press, Random House UK, London.

This edition has been translated with the financial assistance of the Spanish Direccion General del Libro y Bibliotecas, Ministerio de Cultura.

Originally published by Edditorial Anagrama as Estrella distante in 1996

Manufactured in the United States of America.
New Directions books are printed on acid-free paper.
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP993) in 2004.



New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

Destroyer : New Ways Of Living

Maybe I should have loved you.
Maybe I should have sworn
Not to be born
Of this wretched glove too soon,
But a dragon needs room
A dragon needs room
A dragon needs room
To run, run, run, run...

I was a desert in love with extremes.
You married well, a gentlewoman of means who
Kept the word "Destroyer" embroidered on her jeans, too

(La la la)

I wore skins. I didn't care who survived.
The band foretold trends from Spring of '85.
They're calling it "The New Decay"...
Hey, so am I.

(La la la)

Treacherous fop, don't be embarrassed
For looking good at your table on the terrace
That you call home. I'm sold
Paris, London, Rome's too old for you
And your kind
Explosions want to see what they can find:
New ways of living...

It's you and your kind:
The New Ways of Living

The Shampoo

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
– Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

(shigekuni.wordpress.com posted originally)

I The Supreme - pg. 171

So that I too, according to the diagnostic powers of this agnostic savage, have soul-eggs that are all broken. All he sees is emptiness amid the bones. But emptiness is still something; everything depends on what a person makes of it. No? Yes. The pamphleteering fetuses of the chivosis are twisting the wet rag of my body underground. They're drinking maize beer. They keep on twisting me, their pockets bulging with calumnies. They drink more beer. They throw me into the fire. My body smolders in the tremors of being-dead-continually. But they won't put an end to me. I'm water that boils outside the pot, a schoolgirl will say of me. Being dead and remining on my feet is my forte, and even though for me it's all a return trip, it's always adios and onward, and I never come back, right? Right! Do trees grow downward? Do birds fly backward? Does a word that's spoken get wet? Can all of you hear what I don't say, see clearly in the dark? What is said is said. If you only listen to the half of it, you'd understand the double. I feel like a fresh-laid egg.

I The Supreme - pg. 137

The two of you made the trees shake, the water in the river boil when you dived into it naked. Dona Juana's ardor made the white-hot heat of afternoon siestas last far into the night. She brought cool night dew to the boiling point. A fog with the taste of acid drifted across the land bathed in moonlight. It crept into my hermetically sealed house.

I The Supreme - pg. 130

The pelican loves its offspring. If it comes back to the nest and finds that they have bitten by serpents, it tears its breast open with its beak. It washes them in its blood. It restores them to life. Is it not I who am the Supreme Pelican in Paraguay?

I The Supreme - pg. 100

Whoever you are, insolent corrector of my pen, you are beginning to annoy me. You don't understand what I write. You don't understand that the law is symbolic. Twisted minds are unable to grasp this. They interpret the symbols literally. And so you make mistakes and fill my margins with your scoffing self-importance. At least read me correctly. There are clear/obscure symbols. I the Supreme play my passion cold-bloodedly ...

I The Supreme - pg. 65

Books have a destiny, though destiny has no book. Without the people from which they had been cut off by sign and story even the prophets would not have been able to write the Bible. The Greek people called Homer composed the Iliad. The Egyptians and the Chinese dictated their histories to scribes who dreamed of being the people, not copyists who sneezed the way you do on what you've written. A Homer-people creates a novel.

I The Supreme - pg. 59

forget your memory. To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real. The unreal lies only in the bad use of the power of words in the bad use of writing. I don't understand, Sire ... Never mind. The pressure is enormous but you almost don't feel it you don't feel it eh what is it that you feel.

I The Supreme - pg. 51

You remove something from your bosom. Throw. Something bounces off the planisphere, between the constellations of the Altar odor of a musk cat. The unmistakable, immemorial odor of woman. Carnal smell of sex. Lustful, sensual, lubricious, libidinous, salacious, voluptuous, dishonest, shameless, lascivious, fornicatory. Its effluvia expand, fill the room. Penetrate the smallest interstices. Make the heaviest objects sway to and fro as on a tide. The furniture, the arms. Even the meteorite seems to float and bob in the terrible stench. It must be invading the entire city. I am paralyzed with nausea. Retching, on the point of vomiting. With a supreme effort, I contain myself. It is not merely that I smell this female odor, that I have suddenly remembered it. I see it. Fiercer than a phantom that attacks us in broad daylight, leaping back and forth, to the end of those first days, burned up, forgotten, in the brothels of the Lower Town. The smell is here now. Female-Samson, she has embraced the pillars of my temperate temple. She coils her thousands of arms round the wooden columns of my unimpregnable eremitorium-erectorium. Trying to topple it. She looks at me blindly, sniffs at me, invisible. Trying to topple me. Sultan enters.

I The Supreme - pg. 25

A thicker stroke. A thinner one. The mustaches of the t's longer or shorter, depending on how free the hand of the person who set them down. The little pigtail of the o, standing straight up or drooping. Not to mention the instep, the crooked legs of the letters. The columns. The fleurons. The finials. The curlicues. The campanulas capping the capitals. The morning-glory vines of the flourishes drawn in a single spiral with one stroke of the pen, which is what Your Excellency traces beneath his Supreme Nature, climbing the wall of the writing sometimes ... Enough of your scriptuary floriculture, you dimwit!

I The Supreme - pg. 10

She is never without her bezoar stone. She keeps it hidden underneath the niche of the Lord of Patience. More powerful than the image of the Bloodstained God. Talisman. Stair. Platform. Last step. The most resistant. It sustains her in the place of certainty. Place where there is no further need of any sort of help. Obsession has its foundation there. Faith is supported entirely by itself. What is faith if not belief in things that have no verisimilitude? Seeing through a glass darkly.

The ruminant-stone has its own vigil light. Someday it will have its own niche. Perhaps, in time, its sanctuary.

I The Supreme - pg. 5

Do you know what memory is? The stomach of the soul, someone wrongly called it. Though nobody is ever the first to give things a name. There is nothing but an infinity of repeaters. The only things ever invented are new errors. The memory of one person alone is useless.

Stomach of the soul. That's too clever by half!