The King of Harlem 

(Poet in New York 1929-1930)

1.

With a spoon
he scraped out the crocodile eyes,
and popped the monkeys on the knickers—
with his scepter, a spoon

where fire forever slept in his flint,
and beetles lazed drunk on anise,
forgetting comfort, the cold village moss.

That bent crone covered in mushrooms
went where Black men sorrow, where I heard 
the creaking approach of the King’s spoon—
the trucks, their rotten water tanks, they arrived.

Roses broke free along the corners
of the whipping curves of city air
and then took root in pounds of saffron
where the children squished baby squirrels
with the infant blush of a wine harvest’s frenzy.

This is it. Let us now cross these bridges,
let us reach Harlem and the Black people within,
their sacred murmur, so their color and perfume
will rise past our shoulders burning to
a rich, sugary hot pineapple.

This is it. Murder the blondes! The hard liquor seller, 
and all friends of apple and sand,
you must beat them down with closed fists,
and be it necessary be it against the little Jewish women
shaking to boiling,
that the King may sing song to the throng,
that crocodiles may sleep end to end under the asbestos of the moon,
that no one alive may ever once doubt the infinite beauty
of feather dusters, cheese graters, copper pans, and casseroles.

Oh, Harlem, Harlem, Harlem!
Nothing compares to the anguish of your oppressed reds.
Or your shuddering, enraged blood inside a lunar eclipse.
Or your garnet violence, a jewel spinning in the shadow.
Or your grand king, prisoner in a doorman’s uniform.

2.

The night was torn like lizard skin.  It crawled with silent ivory salamanders
and American girls
carried babies and investments in their wombs
while boy stretched their arms hopelessly on the cross and swooned.

They are the ones.
They drink silver whiskey near the volcanoes
and swallow raw, bloody heart in the bear’s frozen mountain.

3.

That night the King of Harlem, with a most implacable spoon
scraped out the crocodile eyes
and popped the monkeys on the knickers—
with his scepter, a spoon.

The Blacks cried in confusion
among umbrellas and gold sunsthe mulattoes stretched rubber, pondering anxiously to turn their torsos white
and wind tarnished mirrors
and broke the veins of the dancers

Blackness, Blackness, Blackness, Blackness
When your nose points up at night, you don’t blush.
The rage under your skin is exposed and unprotected.
Live in the dagger point and in the chest of landscapes
under the claws and the broom of Cancer’s moon.

Blood that searches death’s road dusted with flour
to rise from ashes of funerary spikenards
lifeless, coming down where Mars and Venus come
to spin with the trash on our beaches.

Blood quietly considered, out of the corner of its eye;
the essence, made of squeezed halfah grass, underground nectars.
Blood that oxidizes and the trade wind set into a footprint,
that dissolves the nightshade moth by moon into the window panes.

Blood comes, it will pour
on rooftops, everywhere,
to burn chlorophyll that makes blonde women grow,
to groan and fumble at the feet of the beds before the insomnia of the bathroom vomit begins, but first
we sleep slipping into a tobacco fog and a gentle yellow vanilla sky.

There must be a way out!
A way around the alleys, somewhere in a penthouse to hole up in.
Imagine the tendrils of forest growth penetrating the cracks
to make of you a real beauty, an eclipse without eyes or ears
with a false sense of sadness—whether faded glove and chemical rose.

4.

Silence.  The word on the street, unspoken, it is all that you need;
it is how waiters, busboys, cooks, bootlickers, asslickers to
all those fat cats and gangsters
seek the king in the streets or on the sharp angles to saltpeter.

The wind cuts across at a glance, black mud flying,
spitting at bay boats and driving nails in their shoulders;
a South wind carrying
dog teeth, sunflowers, wooden alphabet games,
and a voltaic battery resuscitating drowned wasps.

I knew oblivion with three drops left to clean my monocle.
I knew love when you looked at me, a flower of stone.  Alone.
And soaring the clouds I knew sustenance and such richness
composing a desert of long stems without a rose.

To the left, and the right, to the South, and the North,
a completely impenetrable wall rises,
whether the magician be mole or water.
In my country, Black people, we do not go to some crack
in the wall for an infinite mask—
we seek the great sun in the center.
Turn into a wild, buzzing swarm of warm, syrupy pineapple.
The sun sliding through the forests,
sure that a nymph will not be there.
The sun that destroyed mathematics, and has never caused a dream,
the tattooed sun coming down the river
and gives a throaty call just ahead of the crocodiles.

Blackness, Blackness, Blackness, Blackness.

No serpent, zebra, or mule ever thought of themselves 
as much as we before death. They didn’t turn pale.
The lumberjack doesn’t know when the wood
he cuts will rot.
Hold still in your vegetal shadow in wait for your King,
until hemlock, thistles, and nettles curl around the balconies and tiles.

Then, Black people, and only then
will you frantically kiss spinning bicycles flying by,
examine pairs of microscopes in subterranean squirrel lairs,
and dance doubtlessly while itching flowers assassinate 
Our Moses near heaven’s gate.

It’s Harlem in disguise!
It’s, Harlem, threatened by a mob of headless suits!
I hear your murmur coming to my ears,
I hear it moving in trees and elevators,
my gray sheets,
where cars float beneath bridges covered with teeth,
by way of dead horses and misdemeanors,
by way of a great awakened, despairing king
whose beard reaches the sea.

Author: Federico García Lorca
Translator: Manny Grimaldi