Poetry Hour: The Line

Three horse-mouths bite the bit

and lick cold metal

suspended between invisible houses.

They wait on empty wires,

to bear a pair of pants, a

child’s summer dress high, above the ground.

Damp cloth hung from lips

and dripped

pale fluid between blades of grass.

Remember gritty textures

of linen, cotton, and calico

to savor and suck dry.

The wooden teeth grind

As the bare limbs of trees wave against a backdrop

where the sky used to be.

Excerpt from Julio Cortázar's "Rayuela" ("Hopscotch" in English)

I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.

You look at me, from close up you look at me, closer and closer and then we play cyclops, we look closer and closer at one another and our eyes get larger, they come closer, they merge into one and the two cyclopses look at each other, blending as they breathe, our mouths touch and struggle in gentle warmth…Then my hands go to sink into your hair, to cherish slowly the depth of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were filled with flowers or with fish, with lively movements and dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we smother each other in a brief and terrible sucking in together of our breaths, that momentary death is beautiful. And there is but one saliva and one flavor of ripe fruit, and I feel you tremble against me like a moon on the water