The Absolute Gravedigger

by Vítězslav Nezval

  Sheds blood

  Under the constant blows

  Of a menacing right hand

  While the woman

  Who is simultaneously a hand

  Bleeds

  From the interminable belly dance

  Of the revolutionary Carmagnole

  While from the bulbs of sweat

  A fiery blossom grows

  And while the burly body

  Of the imposing wrestler

  Legs astraddle

  One and the same barricaded spot

  Writhes

  And draws a shadow on the fences

  Between yards

  Where his own python-like muscles restraining Laocoön

  Convulse

  Every roof

  Of this

  Quiet and idyllic village

  In the reddish dusk pulls on

  A crimson Phrygian cap

  The Plowman

  On the endless horizon

  Where a lone bent birch forms

  A frayed whip

  Stuck

  Into hard mounds of anthracite

  Studding the entire valley

  Covered with luxurious hair

  Untouched by comb

  Trudges

  A marvelous galley slave

  Lugging

  Before him

  Tipped with a plowshare

  An enormous

  Penis

  Slanting down

  Under his gaunt stomach

  And hindering his every step

  Digging into the loose topsoil

  On the feet

  Of this wretch

  Shod

  In potato sacks

  And weighed down

  By two balls

  That painfully spring into the air

  On impact

  With stones

  Earthworms

  Writhe under

  Bad weather has formed

  Deep scars

  Overgrown

  With the overburdened hulls

  Of last year’s rye

  A praying mantis springs from into the air

  Whenever the bare heels of the enormous walker

  Who melancholically gazes

  To the vineyard

  Where a small windmill

  Monotonously measures out his time

  Sink into the earth

  A partridge leaves

  Its ruined nest

  And looks for sure shelter

  In the plowman’s thick beard

  Covered in slivers of quail eggshells and weeds

  The grisly sodomite

  With a fatal tool

  Lightning has engraved

  With the wrinkled stigmata

  Of eternal damnation

  Condemned

  To plow

  Through the stubbled womb

  Of the parched earth

  Strains the muscles on his pate

  Covered in the icy traces of a hailstorm

  And like a furrow

  Spreads open

  The loose folds of large lips

  Swarming with sexton beetles

  Carrying off a grisly tadpole

  While doing this work

  Involving the mortification of flesh

  Ignited in a blaze

  By the sun’s corrosive heat

  A smile

  Plays on the lips

  Of the voluntary slave

  Making them

  A perch

  Taken by

  A colorful butterfly

  And a woodlark

  That devours it

  The magical plowman

  Whose pant buttons have long been motley crown vetches

  Sinks to his knees every now and then

  Although the broad-leafed whip

  Waving in the wind

  And flailing his naked back

  Spurs him on

  So that

  He steps forward again

  Gnawing at his overhanging lower lip

  A drowsy cricket

  Lounges on under a bit of turf

  Then again

  Long strides

  Flung into the air

  With ball and chain

  Protecting some thorns

  Break off pebbles

  From the unctuous clay

  A steel tip

  Embedded there

  Piercing

  The rugged crust

  Of a barren potato field

  Of infertile soil

  That has retained a number of unmistakable traces

  From when it was once a riverbed

  The mythological plowman

  Occasionally manages

  To dig in the sandy terrain

  A well

  That encloses

  Within its round pursed lips

  The plowshare covered by a lump of dirt

  Stuck

  In the depths of intractable soil

  In the fixed eye

  Of the hulking laborer

  Condemned to wade through mire

  From dawn

  To dusk

  Until a deep sleep

  Hurls him inertly onto a slanted stake

  A distant windmill

  Of boundless vertigo

  And migrating storks

  Their sharp gazes fascinated by a far-off chimney

  Spin

  Now as if younger by half a century

  The exhausted slave to himself tries to fling into the air

  The plow

  A part of his chimerical being

  Yet unable to conquer his burden

  A horrible weariness

  Presses him ever lower into the gravel

  Which rustles and rasps

  While the voracious nostalgia

  Of the praying mantis

  Fiddles

  With the magisterial stamina

  Of a big toe

  Turned into fleshy foliage

  On a lame

  Isinglass-flecked

  Leg

  And while the praying mantis

  Changed through benevolent mimesis

  Into an exquisite virginal pea pod

  Arouses

  An accretion of saliva

  In the mouth

  Of the master

  Of sleepless expectation

  Treading on a whalebone of roots

  Shoulders always shaky

  This Promethean

  Three-dimensional

  Slightly rheumatic

  Ochre-splattered

  Short-of-breath

  Bony

  And robust

  Maniac

  Spits

  The last remainder of his sterile

  Saliva

  Soaked with lark droppings colored by raspberries

  Without ceasing to upturn by his tedious plowing

  Mouse holes

  In which the earth lives

  Its intrauterine life

  He also sees

  Dreamily

  Holding his breath

  How sparrow hawks

  Seize

  With their nimble bills

  The frothy

  Flecks

  How they fight for them

  Fiercely pecking each other

  And how these flecks

  Tinged crimson

  With the blood

  Of the grappling raptors

  Descend

  In an evenly accelerated dive

  Into the very center

  Of the furrow

  Which quickly folds over them

  But at the instant

  When these raptors

  Incapable of flight from sudden passion

  Descend

  Upon the twig-covered pate

  Of the saliva spitter’s head

  To settle an ongoing fight

  And to cover with an ornamental cardinal’s hat

  Made from golden entrails

  The fanatic’s tonsure


  Of late

  Set upon

  By the beaks clacking solemnly

  Now transformed

  Into bone earrings

  The imbecile giant

  Bursts

  Into wheezing laughter

  So

  That

  The two

  Ankle-bound

  Balls

  On two

  Errant boulders

  Thrown into his path by a storm

  Shake

  And so these two boulders

  Impressed with the enormous buttocks

  Of the grandparents

  Of the dead man walking

  Disintegrate into red gravel

  The windmill

  With blades

  Washed

  By waves of this laughter

  Ceases its monotonous hurdy-gurdy tune sounding like a ditty

  And stops measuring out

  Work time

  The frayed whip

  Of the solitary birch

  Simultaneously ceases to play its role

  As

  The rhythmic and merciless flagellation of the condemned’s back

  And the cursed laugher

  From whose lips drift

  Indian summers

  That flutter over the wooded horizon

  Resembling a decomposed horse

  Falls

  In a great arc

  Belly up

  Onto his rachitic back

  Unwittingly freeing

  From the clutches of a mole cricket

  The instrument of his damnation

  A pointed beet

  A pebble has bitten into

  On the horizon

  Trembles

  A giant hand lowering from the clouds

  Locking something

  And the agonizing pupils

  Of the plowman

  Suffering a stroke

  See the cowering figure

  Of the sodomite

  Who slumbers

  On the stomach of a dead horse

  And whose brow is garlanded

  As with ribbon

  By the mantis praying the Angelus

  SHADOWPLAYS

  Dusk

  A shoe lies in a ditch

  Scavenged by a maggot

  With a kind of twitch

  Blood trickles from it

  Through holes in the toe

  Where mold has perched

  A rose starts to grow

  A rose from the church

  The setting sun casts

  A gleam on the shoe

  Fading fast

  In a small black pool

  A mole cricket passes on

  This splendid little catch

  Unsteadily resting upon

  A writhing earthworm patch

  The mole cricket lunges

  To catch a water strider

  Just as it plunges

  Into the evening star

  Reflected in this small black pool

  Where a scorpion is concealed

  Shadows swim in the shoe

  Peace comes to the world

  Over backwaters

  A bat flies with wings unfurled

  The Flypaper

  Right above the clay cup

  Of coffee for grandmother

  There is hung up

  A strip of black flypaper

  A bird flew through the window

  And glued its maw

  To a second fly

  The first was getting nibbled by

  A mirror

  Portrays

  This gruesome theater

  As if in a haze

  To the swallow

  Cawing like a pest

  At sheep and goats

  From the heart of its nest

  Which shakes

  In a stable

  Like the coffee that makes

  A puddle on the table

  Tipped over the second

  When in the cup went

  The fallen half-rotten

  Fly-covered serpent

  The Snare

  In an abyss

  Rising into the air

  Caught amiss

  In a fox’s snare

  A beautiful nymph

  With a dying topaz gaze

  Trapped when taking a swim

  Her body bare to the waist

  Her right hand

  As her heart bursts

  Quivers in blood

  And she gives birth

  To a small child

  Without eyes

  Who falls at the end of a thread

  Down a wobbly hillside

  Right into the maw

  Of a wild boar

  Digging at dawn

  In the black moor

  For the forest sprite

  A tomb of dirt

  Curled up in a bright

  Bloodstain on a shirt

  The Cask

  This black cask

  No one peeks in

  This black cask

  Blushes at evening

  As if aghast

  Ah what a task

  Has this black cask

  This black cask

  Is a cask for wine

  Oh how could it not be aghast

  This black cask for wine

  As if it were aghast

  And recalling the past

  In a cowshed corner it reclines

  In the old days endowed

  This black cask with a tap

  Hanging there now

  A large cobweb trap

  A chicken taps

  On this black cask

  Red wine once in its lap

  This black cask

  Bellows and smells foul

  How could it not be aghast

  This empty black cask

  An odorous fowl

  Sits on it and basks

  Oh how could it not be aghast

  This leaky black cask

  The Tuffet

  This tiny tuffet

  Will always be petite

  While those who used it for a seat

  Grew only to shrink

  This tiny tuffet

  Where old grandma is set

  Will soon fall to the ground

  Like those who sat down

  Luckily this tiny tuffet

  On which grandma snuffs it

  Is not a tooth

  Just processed tree root

  If it were a tooth

  In the changing lady’s mouth

  It would still stay forever tiny

  And so would be buried

  Till on the tuffet’s tinder

  Falls an oven fire’s cinder

  While grandma sits sipping rum

  And it ignites her home

  All in time all in time

  Granny will fall and break her spine

  And the tiny tuffet

  Will still be petite

  Like those who used it for a seat

  And grew only to shrink

  The Spool

  The spool on the sewing machine

  Is a source of worry

  For the spider unseen

  In the corner it scurries

  To avoid the pedaling foot

  Conducting up and down

  A steady beat for the output

  Meanwhile the town

  Through curtains made

  Of crimson lace

  Across the lap splayed

  A kitten plays

  The town untangles the spool that whirls

  Embedded in the yard outside

  And blinds the girl

  Taking the white revolutions in stride

  So she yawns

  Stretching her slouching spine

  And fills her mouth of dawns

  With shadows of cobwebs entwined

  This treading on the floor

  Really takes its toll

  If she yawns once more

  She will swallow th
e spider whole

  The Anthill

  Say what you must

  Say what you will

  As if she said forest

  As if she said anthill

  In that forest

  All go astray with errant flowers in their tracks

  Many times lost

  Forever lost the way back

  In that anthill

  So low as if dug by a mole

  All disappear in the blood puddle

  Death comes for all

  Say what you must

  Say what you will

  As if he said forest

  As if he said anthill

  Even if no mist and the sun is warm

  In that forest dusk is always near

  The ants all swarm

  There are no birds here

  Say what you must

  Say what you will

  As if she said forest

  As if he said anthill

  The Gloves

  There shines a candle

  Above a thousand-page book

  Always to the sound of death knells

  Gloves hang from a hook

  Nobody knows

  Whence they came or

  How the choir chose

  Whom it sings for

  This thousand-page tome

  As the death knell chimes

  Turns pages on its own

  Sprinkled with tears sometimes

  Dog-eared pages

  Crease themselves

  And catch falling midges

  From the uncanny gloves

  That marvelous leather pair

  With fingers that tap

  They appear

  Like two hands clasped

  From their veins of blue

  While sobbing breaks the calm

  Blood shows through

  And gushes from the palm

  The Lamp

  Around the lamp in the stairway

  Lighting the deserted chateau

  Built in the style of Art Nouveau

  Parades of shadows sway

  Shadow after shadow bends down

  In pairs kneeling

  Convulsively reeling