That English cry of yours, which in my blood becomes
universal,
A cry like no other, without human form or voice,
That tremendous cry which seems to resound
Inside a cavern whose roof is the sky
And seems to tell all the sinister things
That can happen in the Faraway, on the Sea, at Night . . .
(You always pretended to be calling a schooner,
Cupping your large, dark and weathered hands
On the sides of your mouth to make a megaphone, crying:
Aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o o-o-o- - - - yyyy ...
Schooner aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- - - - yyyy . . . )
I can hear you from here, now, and I wake up to something.
The wind shudders. The morning rises. The heat sets in.
I feel my cheeks redden.
My conscious eyes dilate.
Ecstasy stirs, increases, ascends in me.
And with a blind, riotous hum
The flywheel’s restless spinning intensifies.
O clamorous call
Whose heat and fury make all my yearnings
Seethe in one explosive ensemble,
And even my tediums—all of them!—become dynamic . . .
An appeal made to my blood
By an old love from I don’t know where that returns
With still enough strength to allure and pull me,
With still enough power to make me hate this life
I live amidst the physical and psychic impermeability
Of the real people all around me!
Ah, to depart! By whatever means and to whatever place!
To set out across the waves, across unknown perils, across
the sea!
To go Far, to go Wide, toward Abstract Distance,
Indefinitely, through deep and mysterious nights,
Carried like dust by the winds, by the gales!
To go, go, go once and for all!
All of my blood lusts for wings!
All of my body lurches forward!
I rush through my imagination in torrents!
I trample myself underfoot, I growl, I hurtle!
My yearnings burst into foam
And my flesh is a wave crashing into cliffs!
Thinking about this—O rage! Thinking about this—O fury!
Thinking about the smallness of my life full of yearnings,
Suddenly, tremulously, extraorbitally,
With a vicious, vast and violent rocking
Of the restless flywheel of my imagination,
The dark and sadistic libido of the strident maritime life
Breaks out of me whistling, hooting, and raving.
Hey sailors, look-outs! Hey shipmates, pilots!
Navigators, seamen, mariners, adventurers!
Hey ship captains! Hey men at the helm and on the masts!
Men who sleep on wooden bunks!
Men who sleep with Danger peeking through the portholes!
Men who sleep with Death for a pillow!
Men who have decks and bridges from where they can gaze
Upon the vast vastness of the vast sea!
Hey crane operators!
Hey sail trimmers, stokers, cabin boys!
Men who load cargo in the holds!
Men who coil ropes on deck!
Men who polish the hardware of the hatches!
Men at the helm! men on the engines! men on the masts!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
Men with peaked caps! Men in mesh undershirts!
Men with anchors and crossed flags embroidered on their
chests!
Tattooed men! Men with pipes! Men on the gunwales!
Swarthy from so much sun, shriveled from so much rain,
Clear-eyed from so much vastness all around them,
Bold-faced from so much wind having pounded them!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
Men who’ve seen Patagonia!
Men who’ve been to Australia!
Men who’ve feasted your eyes on coasts I’ll never see!
Who’ve landed in lands where I’ll never set foot!
Who bought primitive goods in colonies at the fore
of hinterlands!
And you did all of this as if it were nothing,
As if this were natural,
As if life were simply this,
As if you weren’t even fulfilling a destiny!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
Men of today’s ocean! Men of yesterday’s ocean!
Pursers! Galley slaves! Combatants at Lepanto!
Pirates from Roman times! Mariners from Greece!
Phoenicians! Carthaginians! Portuguese launched from
Sagres
Into an uncertain adventure, onto the Absolute Sea,
to achieve the Impossible!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
Men who erected stone pillars and gave names to capes!
Men who traded for the first time with black people!
Who first sold slaves from new lands!
Who bestowed the first European spasm on startled Negro
women!
Who brought back gold, beads, fragrant woods, arrows,
From hillsides bursting with lush vegetation!
Men who pillaged peaceful African villages,
Who put the natives to flight with booming cannons,
Who killed, who robbed, who tortured, who won
The reward of New Things for rushing headlong
Into the mystery of new seas! Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
I salute all of you in one man, and one man in all of you,
All of you mixed together, all intermingled,
All of you bloody, violent, hated, feared, fabled,
I salute you, I salute you, I salute you!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey! Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
Hey-la-oh-la-oh-la-OH-la-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
I want to go with you, I want to go with you,
With all of you at the same time
To every place you’ve been!
I want to meet head-on the same dangers you met,
To feel on my face the winds that withered yours,
To spit from my lips the salt of the seas that kissed yours,
To help swab your decks, to be with you in storms,
To arrive like you, finally, at extraordinary ports!
To flee with you from civilization!
To lose with you all sense of morality!
To feel my humanity change in faraway places.
To drink with you in southern seas
New savageries, new tumults in my soul,
New central fires in my volcanic spirit!
To go with you, to take off (Get the hell out of here!)
My civilized man’s suit, my mild-mannered ways,
My congenital fear of chains and fetters,
My peaceful life,
My seated, static, orderly and repetitive life!
To the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea!
Ah, throw my life to the wind, to the waves,
To the sea!
Salt with windblown foam
My taste for great voyages!
Thrash with whipping water the flesh of my adventure,
Douse with the cold depths the bones of my existence,
Scourge, cut and shrivel with winds, foams and suns
My cyclonic, Atlantic being,
My nerves stretched out like taut shrouds,
A lyre in the hands of the winds!
Yes, yes, yes . . . Crucify me on your ocean crossings
And my shoulders will revel in my cross!
Tie me to your voyages as if to stakes,
And the sensation of the stakes will enter through my spine
And I’ll feel them in a vast, passive ecstasy!
Do what you like with me, as long as it’s at sea,
On ship decks, to the sound of waves.
Wound me, rip me open, kill me!
All I want is to take to Death
A soul overflowing with Sea,
Drunk silly on maritime things,
On sailors as well as on anchors, ropes,
On distant coasts as well as on the winds’ howling,
On the Faraway as well as on the Wharf, on shipwrecks
As well as on peaceful trade operations,
On masts as well as on the waves,
To take to Death—in voluptuous pain—
A body covered with leeches sucking away,
Covered with strange, absurd, green sea leeches!
Make shrouds out of my veins!
Hawsers out of my muscles!
Flay my skin and nail it to the keels!
And let me feel the pain of the nails and never stop feeling it!
Make my heart into an admiral’s flag
On a ship of old in time of war!
Yank out my eyes and grind them into the deck with your
feet!
Smash my bones against the gunwales!
Tie me to the masts and thrash me, thrash me!
To all the winds of all latitudes and longitudes
Spill my blood over the raging waters
That sweep across the poop deck
In the storms’ wild convulsions!
To have the audacity of sailcloth in the wind!
To be, like the topsails, the whistling of the winds!
An old guitar playing a fado about seas rife with dangers,
A song for sailors to hear and not repeat!
The sailors who mutinied
Hung the captain from a sail yard.
Another they left on a desert isle,
Marooned!
The sun of the tropics has made my taut veins seethe
With the fever of old-time piracy.
The winds of Patagonia have tattooed my imagination
With tragic and obscene images.
Fire, fire, fire, inside me!
Blood! blood! blood! blood!
My brain is bursting!
The world as I know it explodes in red!
My veins snap with the sound of cables!
And from deep within booms the savage and insatiable
Song of the Great Pirate,
The bellowing death of the Great Pirate, whose singing
Sends a chill down the spine of his men.
Astern he dies, howling his song:
Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
And then yells in a blasting, unreal voice:
Darby M’Graw-aw-aw-aw-aw!
Darby M’Graw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw!
Fetch a-a-aft the ru-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-um, Darby!
Ah, what a life! what a life that was!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
Hey-la-oh-la-oh-la-OH-la-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
Split keels, sunken ships, blood on the seas!
Decks awash in blood, sectioned corpses!
Severed fingers left lying on gunwales!
Heads of children here and there!
People with gouged eyes shouting, screaming!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
I bundle up in all this as in a cloak when it’s cold!
I rub against all this like a cat in heat against a wall!
I roar for all this like a famished lion!
I rush at all this like a crazed bull!
I dig my nails into this, break my claws on it and chew it till
my teeth bleed!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
Suddenly I hear the old cry,
Now harsh, angry, metallic,
Like a bugle blasting at my side,
Calling the sighted prey,
The schooner that’s going to be seized:
Aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- - - - yyyy ...
Schooner aho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- - - - yyyy . . .
The World has ceased to exist for me! I’m burning red!
I roar in fury for the attack!
Pirate chief! Pirate Caesar!
I plunder, kill, rip, slash!
All I feel is the sea, the prey, the pillage!
All I feel within are the veins of my temples
Beating, and beating me!
The sensation of my eyes is bleeding hot blood!
Hey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey-ey!
Ah pirates, pirates, pirates!
Love me and hate me, pirates!
Take me into your midst, pirates!
How your rage and cruelty speak to the blood
Of a woman’s body that once was mine and whose lust
has survived!
I’d love to be an animal that would embody all your acts,
That would sink its teeth into the hulls and keels,
That would eat masts, drink blood and tar on ship decks,
Chew sails, oars, ropes and pulleys—
A monstrous, female sea-serpent gorging on your crimes!
And there’s a symphony of incompatible and analogous
sensations,
An orchestration in my blood of deafening crimes,
Of convulsive clamors from bloody orgies on the high sea,
All raging like a torrid gale through my mind,
A cloud of hot dust obscuring my perception
So that I see and dream all this with my skin and veins only!
Pirates, piracy, vessels and the hour,
The maritime hour when prey are captured
And the terror of the captured escapes into madness—
that hour
With all its crimes, terror, vessels, people, sea, sky, clouds,
Breezes, latitude, longitude, shouting voices,
I’d like the Whole of this to be the Whole of my body,
suffering,
To be my body and my blood, to form the stuff of my being
in red,
To thrive like an itching wound in my soul’s unreal flesh!
Ah, to be everything in every crime! To be all the component
parts
Of raids on ships, of slaughters and rapes!
To be whatever was on the spot where pillages occurred,
To be whatever lived or was left dead on the site of
gory tragedies!
To be the sum-total-pirate of all piracy at its zenith,
And the flesh-and-blood synthesis of all pirate victims in the
world!
To be in my passive body the woman-all-women
Ever raped, killed, cut and mauled by pirates!
To be in my submissive self the female who needs to be
theirs!
And to feel all this—all these things all at once—running
down my spine!
O my hairy and gruff heroes of adventure and crime!
My seafaring brutes, husbands of my imagination!
Casual lovers of my oblique sensations!
I long to be That Woman who waits for you in ports,
For you, heinous men she loves in dreams with her pirate
blood!
For she would rage with you, though only in spirit,
Over the naked corpses of your victims at sea!
For she would be with you in your crimes, and in your
oceanic orgy
Her witch’s spirit would invisibly dance around each
movement
Of your bodies, your cutlasses, your strangling hands!
On land she would wait for you, and when you came, if you
came,
In your love’s roaring she would drink all the vast,
Foggy and sinister perfume of your conquests,
And as you convulsed in ecstasy she would whistle a red and
yellow sabbat!
Flesh torn, bodies cut open and gutted, the blood spurting!
Now as my dream of your
deeds reaches its climax,
I lose myself completely, I stop belonging to you, I am you,
My femininity is not just to be with you, it’s to be your very
souls!
To be inside all your brutality at the time you wreaked it,
To imbibe deep down your consciousness of what you felt
When you tinged the high sea with blood,
When now and then you tossed to the sharks
The still living bodies of the wounded and the pink flesh of
children,
And you dragged their mothers to the deck rails to look at
what happened to them!
To be with you in your carnage and plundering!
To be harmonized with you in the symphony of your
pillages!
Ah, how much and in how many ways I’d like to be yours!
To be not only your woman, not only your women, not only
your victims,
Not only your victimized men, women, children and ships,
To be not only that hour and the vessels and the waves,
Not only your souls, your bodies, your rage, your property,
To be not only the abstract orgy of your deeds in my physical
self,
Not only this, I’d like to be more than this—the God that’s
all this!
I’d have to be God, the God of an inverted faith,
A monstrous and satanic God, the God of a blood-based
pantheism,
To be able to fill up every cranny of my imaginative fury
And never exhaust my desire to identify
With the each and the all and the more-than-all of your
conquests!
Ah, torture me to cure me!
Let my flesh be the air your cutlasses slice
Before they fall on heads and necks!
Let my veins be the clothes your knives rip right through!
My imagination the body of the women you rape!
My mind the deck you stand on while killing!
My entire life—in its nervous, hysterical, absurd ensemble—
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe Page 13
