The Exhumed Poem by Jorge Enrique Adoum

If you were saying, if you were wondering from where
it came, who it is, where it lives, it could not
speak but of death, of substances
long decomposed and of which only
images remain; if you ask again,
it would say to pass the room at the back
of the house, that keeps destroying lips
like whips, faces, useful and useless
remains and of transitory relatives
in its simple seclusion.
But who could still
mark the place of birth, who
at the crossroads of the rooms, finds
the door through which the path was wrong?

Behind its blind enclosure, the man
and his strange woman, that the evening promptly
restores, often confused with deceased or abandoned
lovers, undress in the dark,
close their eyes, first the windows, and with voice
and with hands down, incite themselves to sleep
because it's cold. But one day they awaken
forever nude, discovering the age
of their sad marital territory, and tolerate each other
for the last time, definitively, pardoning
backwards their mute confession of shared time.

Across consecutive haunches, overturning
like generations of bells, the dry river
of customs and ash continues, drags
false flowers, memories, used tears
like medals, and in any son recommences
his ancestral cemetary.

Because naked and again
without history I come: greeting, shouting, beating
the exact heart with the dwelling
of the resident, I want to touch his converted
hands on the root of woman and land, and again
I ask if I was here before,
when I left in order to come back loving this return,
if I have arrived yet, if I have destroyed
the ancient inheritance of fear and glass beads
where god gave way to blows,
whether what he had and defended had died
from his own noise, from his own sword,
for upon the legacy of savage time
and his secrets, upon his bones
definitively ground and burned,
upon the blood poured night after night
on the ruined vegetation, on the looms,
reborn or continually resuscitating.