Tin Scales
Under the tarps stretched to tear the rain
they exchange roots still steeped in mud
and the iron of hooks holds quarters of beef.
A woman rubs a bitter core,
counts coins in the hollow of a cloth.
On poplar crates the fennel surrenders
to the briny odor rising from the octopus stall,
where the blade divides white from viscera.
A boy drags a basket of mud
and calls the oranges with a voice of copper.
The scales oscillate without finding rest,
they hold the weight of clusters and dust
before the pan returns to the suspended air.
A rotted leaf falls on the edge of the marble,
ice flakes in thin channels.
Noon withdraws the crowd from the wet stalls,
crushed peels remain on the cuts of the pavement
and the boy sweeping the residual scale of the fish.
Everything has paid its price to the light
and shadow sits on the wooden voids.
Explanation
The starting point of the composition stems from the raw, material observation of the neighborhood market, understood not as a picturesque folkloric sketch, but as a primordial theater of exchange and biological transformation. The environment reveals itself through the concreteness of its everyday elements, where nourishment constantly coexists with waste and physical toil. The lyrical opening rejects idealization to plunge into the humid textures of earthly matter, exploring the continuous friction between human presences and the tangible residues of commerce. The square thus becomes a pulsing, chaotic microcosm where every gesture responds to an archaic necessity, tied to hunger, survival, and the inescapable transience of all bodies exposed in the open air.
The main images focus on visual and tactile juxtapositions of great sensory density, capable of conveying the weight of vegetable and animal materials. We find roots steeped in mud conversing with the anatomical violence of suspended beef quarters, while the vegetal odor of fennel is overpowered by the carnality of the fish stall. The emblem of the oscillating scales stands out, a measuring instrument capturing the ephemeral instant of bargaining before emptying itself. The crushed ice, slowly dissolving into trickles among the crates, introduces a thermal sensation of continuous dissolution. Finally, the human crowd contrasts with the trampled peels and solitary scales, outlining a landscape where teeming life soon gives way to abandonment.
The strophic development follows the temporal arc of a morning of buying and selling, dividing into four well-defined successive frames. The first stanza opens the visual space under makeshift shelters, showing the first elementary gestures of shopping and the silent counting of money. In the second stanza, the scene widens to the chaotic mixture of the stalls, where the blade divides the white from the viscera and the youthful voice seeks buyers. The third stanza slows the descriptive rhythm, lingering on the mechanical tension of the scales and the gradual decay of waste on the wet floor. The concluding stanza records the receding crowd upon the arrival of the meridian hour, sealing the end of mercantile activity with the solitary action of cleaning the pavement among the now deserted stalls.
The lexicon employed favors precise, concrete vocabulary devoid of superfluous ornaments, carefully chosen for their adherence to the described physical reality. Terms like mud, core, poplar, marble, and scale anchor the verse to an earthly dimension, shunning any consolatory abstraction. The linguistic choices favor verbs of strong material traction such as rubs, drags, oscillate, and sweeps, imparting a tangible muscular fatigue to the entire narration. Natural elusion, as found in the expression surrenders, accommodates the spontaneity of contemporary poetic speech. There are no concessions to high-flown language or stereotyped formulas: every word is summoned for its rough exactness, giving back to the reader the sour and truthful taste of manual labor consumed day after day among the city stalls.
The rhythmic structure of the lyric is based on free verses of broad breath, predominantly hendecasyllables and long lines, which accommodate the heaviness of the described movements. The internal caesura of many verses reproduces the broken pace of the market, punctuated by pauses, bargains, and sudden restarts. The hard sounds, dominated by dental, liquid, and sibilant consonants, create a raw acoustic texture, evident in nexuses like iron of the hooks or peels crushed on the cuts of the pavement. Traditional rhymes are consciously avoided in favor of internal assonances and consonances, which bind the stanzas in a subterranean and cohesive way. This metric architecture guarantees a grave and constant progression, perfectly tuned to the wear and tear of daily work and the implacable descent of midday.
The overall meaning of the work goes beyond minor chronicle to transform the market into the symbol of the vital cycle of matter, dominated by rapid consumption and the payment of the debt of existence. The close of the lyric gathers this existential reflection: the assertion that everything has paid its price to the light highlights how visibility and commerce entail inevitable organic wear. The final abandonment, personified in the shadow sitting on the wooden voids, returns the square to a ghostly and unadorned quiet, almost a return to nothingness after the industrious roar. The indelible trace of human experience remains, enclosed in the solitude of whoever cleans up the remnants when the illusion of the commercial festival has now entirely dissolved in the heat.