Looking for a good poem I came across this poem written by Argentinean Oliverio Girondo.
I don't give a darn if women's breasts are like magnolias or like dried figs; a complexion like a peach or like sandpaper. Importance equal to zero I give to whether they awake with a breath like an aphrodisiac or a breath like insecticide. I am perfectly capable of bearing a nose that would take first prize at a carrot show; but one thing is for sure! And this is irreducible. Under no pretext whatsoever will I forgive them for not knowing how to fly. Any one of them who doesn't know how to fly is wasting her time trying to seduce me!
This was – and none other – the reason that I fell in love, so madly, with María Luisa.
What did I care about her lips in installments and her sulfurous jealousies? What did I care about her web-footed extremities and her looks that withheld judgment?
María Luisa was truly light as a feather!
From daybreak on, she flew from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the dining room to the pantry. Flying she prepared my bath, my shirt. Flying she did her shopping, her chores…
With what impatience I waited for her to return, flying, from some outing in the surroundings! There far off, lost in the clouds, a little pink dot. "María Luisa! María Luisa!...and in a few seconds, she was there embracing me with her feather-like legs, to carry me, flying, to anyplace at all.
For kilometers in silence we soared on a caress that brought us close to paradise; for hours on end we nested in a cloud, like two angels, and then suddenly, in a loop-the-loop, on a dead leaf, the forced landing of a spasm.
How delightful to have a woman so light…even if she makes us, from time to time, see stars! How voluptuous to pass the days among the clouds…to pass the night on a single flight!
After knowing an ethereal woman, can an earthly woman render us any sort of attraction? Isn't it true that there is no substantial difference between living with a cow or with a woman who has her buttocks seventy-eight centimeters off the ground?
I, at least, am incapable of understanding the seduction of a pedestrian woman, and no matter how much effort I put into conceiving of it, it is not possible for me to even imagine that love can be made any other way but flying.
Oliverio Girondo
(translated by Dan Newland)
(translated by Dan Newland)
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