Lullaby

The woofers, where this neighbourhood deigns to praise you,
sing no sweet Delius, but a churlish cumbia.
Some northern cur’s gone mauled your sun, seen foaming
much too madly these days over your cradle,
weighing you against the insects it’s enhancing,
curling its lip at the troubled cream of your skin.
You chuckle up at a queer carousel of buzzards,
expecting food. The water here’s not good.
That war trickling in your ears, we worked for weeks
to pay for, that it should rill just so:
now, nests of anchor-girls infest the patio --
we come and go, a hand in our back pocket.
Look! we’re mutants: a volcanic time did this,
and now we suffer from tremors; these scarred faces,
hangdog with the heavy implications of bacon
fetched and lugged daily through thief-rife hillsides,
drip over your crib, apologetically hideous.
Your brave bones curdle and set as the days fly by,
fighting through feeding’s traffic to catch the last
wine-dregs and wet sarney-rinds of the party
humanity inconsiderately had without you
(to judge by the trash, it must have been a good one);

it’s not to halt you that I would hold the sun
still if I could, but only because infant
rolls over infant, breaks, and ebbs into albums
faster than I can find the matching music,
faster than I can find your thoughts out for you.
Already, you shake a tiny fist at Prokofiev
wolf-whistled from a departing door; already,
you seem into soft-porn close-ups in a big way.
Sleep? -- there’s a plan: through the fizz and foison
of the cells, sleep is something we can keep
safe from the clutch of stalking disappointment,
safe from the blasted clearings, while lost
innocences cluster round your head like petals.


(viejo, pero sirve)