Let the Dead Come to Me

[“brilliant candle of God”]

Santiago Vizcaíno



I

Burn, burn! In the distance the world burns. Above its wounds, the stench of rapidly scorching meat has become unbearable. The hell drawing nearer has an enormous maw like the vagina dentata of the world. A great phlegm descends from the clouds and it rains, rains in the very center of the flame over the transparency of the chasm, rains over the fire gorging upon torture. Death’s appetite has not been satiated by water from the sky. All afternoon the elephant’s skull boils and spatters the shredded man’s hide. Burn, burn! The immense space of God’s language is also opened up to death: biped tongue, unconscionable body, eternal music that burbles in the path of the chest.

 
II

The Torah burns, and the Tibetan canon, the Pearl of Great Price, the Principia Discordia, the Holy Piby, the Koran, the Satanic Bible, the Ramayana, and the Bible. The enormous library of fanaticism burns. The apocalyptic sweetness of Bosch also burns, Rembrandt’s baroque, the ugly gaze of the Mona Lisa, a forgotten Picasso nude, Giacometti’s head of hair in a Man Ray photo. The Flowers of Illustrious Poets of Spain burn, the Knight of the Sad Countenance, the coltishness of Góngora, and Quevedo’s nose. The twentieth century burns like a shapeless stain. For the fire, the order imposed by the aesthetic canon does not exist. History is chance, finite glory which now comes to its end. If it lays waste to life, so it does with death. Nothingness will remain and will gaze upon itself in search of recognition.

 
III

The body has transformed into an ancient horde that sacrificed the wretchedness of its own beauty. All the women shall urinate upon the two faces of the tragic splintered hero. Do not wait for Nature to come once again to confuse you, sad reminder of a dismal collection of symbols of Evil. Forget also that there was a tremendous being who bought your heart with the entelechy of the spirit. The fire consumes the gaze of the other, who also wants to flee. Flee, cowards! Neither shall the gesture of recognition save you. Stuttering in its circle of flesh, the navel burns.

 
IV

It is the hurricane someone said, but he was blind. It found some sleeping, who felt only a prickling in their feet. Blessed are those whose anusless spine was unsuspecting of destruction’s course. Blessed also the lovers who melded with the fire and the orgasm of the abyss. Burn, burn!, it is best not to wake the mother’s breast, the starving child who before nursed in plentitude. Surely someone will also laugh from asphyxiation and arrogance. But it will not be possible to join together, protect one another. Better to open your arms so that death with her crown of needles may enter. Neither should you be fooled by the announcement of the ingenuous resurrection. Beyond the luminous mouth, the solitary beard of the faceless flame.

 
V

I am thinking on the sweetness of the nutritive act executed by fire. I am thinking on the useless Savoir of this miracle of death. Cortés would have likewise enjoyed this beautiful spectacle. Smell the harebrained tongue of the house’s master. Smell the ferocious mouth bloated with our waste. Smell my mother’s vulva with her sterile uterus. Smell the vagabond’s tongue with his starving dogs. All that burns now was, in the first days, distinct. And now: the great reveal of the rubbish dump, the nighttime bonfire of the end, the combustion of the living, the tropical extreme that breaks the earth’s skin.  

 
VI

The gale accompanying the burning heat’s vehemence does not distinguish sleep from transcendence. It so happens that here, no one shall be saved. No one shall repent. Go, gaze upon the light show in the great filthy tent of ashes! Bothersome the howls of the girls who rise and vanish from their swings. Bothersome also the corpses trampling over one another; they shall no longer die, for there is no return.

 
VII

The morning shall feed upon the resignation produced by oblivion’s mendicancy. And the flame shall tear asunder the name of God, for everything dies in the igneous womb where the immense weeping drowns in the spring of agony. Only pain of possession fills the universe, which is also formed in hell’s cavity. This is what can be seen: a perfect hearth, a ball of fire, palate of sun in infinity, thawed ice in a poisoned atmosphere, the sea’s evaporation in a sigh; Lucifer’s eye staring at the sky, spitting at the sky. Glow of the city. Origin of the noise. Fear the night’s dream like the foam of gold.

 
VIII

Language is fire. Its eyes, tongues of fire. Its voice, bronze polished in fire. I have the keys to death and to hell, it said. It writes the secret meaning of the golden candelabra. It understands the secret meaning of the stars above my hand like thousands of birds. I know you suffer, it said. But I do not forsake, said I.

 
IX

Not Sun obfuscated by ardent Moon. Only the fire feeding upon God’s alcoholic breath. Lord, the face of hatred now devours the walled city. And now, from which wall to contemplate the great silence?

 
X

The golden tongue easily thaws the snow of the poles and the water boils. Mercy’s finger was burnt to the bone, now charred, now dust of anguish. What shines within the fire like a muscle? The Great Pyromaniac lets loose his rage, which is more the all-enshrouding scorching tenderness of the tropics.

 
(coda)

At this moment death takes life by her tresses and drags her through the empty vacuum of the Universe. Oh my blind repose engulfed by the boiling! Oh, Pluto!

translated from the Spanish by Kimrey Anna Batts

Read the original in Spanish

Like many of Vizcaíno’s poems, “Let the Dead Come to Me” employs a twisted, fun-house mirror version of biblical imagery and syntax. The god here is distant, uncaring, and the flames consuming the dying world are “feeding upon [his] alcoholic breath.” Death is the leading character in this apocalyptic nightmare, who in the end “takes life by her tresses and drags her through the empty vacuum of the Universe.” 

The subtext, however, is one of subtle irony, a jab at the overblown importance of religion, art, and humanity itself. Much of Vizcaíno’s work is bitingly self-referential, a sarcastic take-down of his virility, an exposé of his flaws. While that voice is more muted in this particular piece, the sense of irrelevance, of being an insignificant speck in the vastness of the universe, is very clearly present. At only one point during the poem does the poet speak in the first person, in this strikingly beautiful passage: “Language is fire. Its eyes, tongues of fire. Its voice, bronze polished in fire. I have the keys to death and to hell, it said. It writes the secret meaning of the golden candelabra. It understands the secret meaning of the stars above my hand like thousands of birds. I know you suffer, it said. But I do not forsake, said I.”

Language here takes on a life of its own, becomes a force more powerful than god or than death, a force to which the tortured poet speaks and reveals his suffering. It understands the secrets hidden beyond the flames and destruction, and the poet clings to it as solace and refuge. Poetic language serves to provide insight that surpasses the confines of what can be expressed in speech or in fiction—something that grazes the idea of the sublime, provides a sensation both within the language and beyond it, and captures the essence of existence.

Santiago Vizcaíno (born 1982, Quito) is a writer, poet, and essayist. He currently works as director of the Center for Publications at the Catholic Pontifical University of Ecuador (PUCE). In translation, his poems and short stories have appeared in a number of journals, including Bitter Oleander Review, Chattahoochee Review, Connotation Press, Eleven/Eleven, eXchanges, Words Without Borders, Lunch Ticket, The Brooklyn Rail, and Ezra. His poetry collection Devastación en la tarde received the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 2008. It was translated into English by Alexis Levitin and published as Destruction in the Afternoon by Diálogos Books in 2015. In 2010, he was awarded the Premio Pichincha de Poesía for En la penumbra.

Kimrey Anna Batts (born 1983) grew up in rural East Tennessee and went to the University of Michigan, where she studied anthropology and Latin American studies. She moved to Ecuador in 2006, and her lifelong love of literature and language gradually blossomed into a career as a professional translator. In 2011 she went to Barcelona to pursue an M.A. in literary translation at University Pompeu Fabra, before returning to Quito in 2013. Her translations have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Ricochet Review, Lunch Ticket, Bitter Oleander Review, and the Cordite Poetry Review, among others.