La enterraron en la tumba familiar
y en las profundidades tembló e polvo
del que fue su marido:
la alegría
de los vivos
es la pena de los muertos.
Octavio Paz, “Epitafio de una vieja”*
In a side-chapel disguised as poverty,
a somber triad of ageless women in black
share silent histories in absentia:
a nether-cosmos,
wisdom indifferent to the Greek logophilia.
Three ageless women in black who have replaced
three ageless women in black who have replaced
generations in a Zodiak of ageless indistinguishable
trines in black,
sit silent, like Moirai at their profound work,
Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos –
a black trinity arranged before the supine
effigy of a petrified saint,
who lies for the convenient ortho-dogma
of pliable theology.
The women in black know the range of liturgies:
They are mothers.
They are grandmothers.
They are the generations that marry young,
from Quinseañera to alter in a quick-change of finery,
from white to white
to black.
They have tamed husbands –
mostly tame, and mostly for their only protection
in the earthy fields and kitchens,
the door-yards of Purgatory.
They have raised children well beyond the number
that obliterates ease and maybe love –
stretched out and far away into the population of generations
filling barrio and church and church-yard.
The women in black are acquainted with Earth –
the matters of nature, nurture, culture –
Death.
Outside the eucharistical numbness of eternality,
beyond the automatic sacrifice of meditation
the women survive,
mere and fully mortal
como los sagrados emblemos profanos
of all who survive:
Ellos sobriviven.
La muerte no es más que justicia – ciega.
No menos. Pero Ciega.
*They buried her in the family tomb
and in the depths the dust
of what was once her husband
trembled:
joy for the living
is sorrow for the dead.
(trans. Eliot Weinberger)