Black Stone Lying On A White Stone by Cesar Vallejo

Watching this new show, NUMB3RS. I think it’s true, you know. Great mathematicians have no great facility for language, and great writers have no great facility for numbers. Or maybe, I am just not that well-read.

Black Stone Lying On A White Stone
Cesar Vallejo
Translated by Robert Bly

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris–and I don’t step aside—
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.

Cesar Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads…