Poems from Quebrada de la Virgen

(excerpts)

Armando Rojas Guardia (Caracas, 1949)




19

Unsought, they rise today
the bread without the table's support,
the clear water without the cup,
the tree without the letters to write or pronounce it,
the punctual bird in the sleeping city.

The rain stepping on grass and resucitating
virgin perfumes. The new lime
glows on the wall of the belltower
where Sunday calls me in.

That moss on the pavement
reminds me the (subversive) World
eventually defeats History. And with it,
this day conquers, complete and silent,
surrender within its glut, trash
accumulated on the sidewalk yesterday.

There's a holiday in the entrails of silence
and even the motorcycles sound today
in festive emptiness, like a circus
of prehistoric animals playing
the ear's sylvan childhood.

The ever-present street is another street:
a stamp written from behind
in the first calligraphy of light.
There are no butterflies but instead
that dog's eyes, under the porch,
are thankful, watery, in the warm sun.

They watch me, ignoring their own sweetness
in the ecstatic prayer of instinct.

How did this hour's myth crystalize
in the liquid atheism of time?
Someone draws the day for us.
Someone loves me today, secretly.

(To Alberto Barrera)








25

Just as sometimes we'd like to have seen
Karl Marx and Arthur Rimbaud
meet at a table
in some London cafe
while on the Thames's deaf water
—clouded by oily patches
floating between bottles and stubs
and the grey clothing of the drowned—
the Drunken Boat awaits, already unanchored,
waiting for the specter to cover Europe
and to get on at last, to sail off
(Karl, dressed in blue jeans for sailing,
says goodbye to Engels at the dock
and Tahur does the same with Verlaine
—the insolent dreams stored until now
in the cap he wore at the Commune);

just as, at this stage, we'd like it
if Hegel, honored by the platform of his seminar,
could have visited Hölderlin one afternoon,
at his hidden tower hospital
to listen to the demented poet
—without recognizing him, perhaps—
speak to him of an old friend from Tubinga
with whom, in the middle of an adolescent party,
he danced one morning, next to a tree
they had planted and grown
(They'd call it "Liberty")
as fierce and happy as children peeing
with the audacity of dogs, in front of the king
(within monochord summer's sleep,
remembering the sweetest girlfriends from Heidelburg,
the two companions confess:
Reason must ask Madness for
her irreductible dance, the innocence
with which mad Hyperion, from his tower,
explains to the professor about white light,
the rose of the Spirit's winds,
it doesn't end in the Caesar's State
mocking the Prussians' Kaisers);

I would wish that William Blake were allowed
one single day to preach today
above the carved pulpit of a church
—Westminster Abbey, for instance—
in the presence of Archbishops and priests,
and a multitude of worshippers
sick, as everyone is, of sermons.
I imagine the sacred wind resonating
for the first time, next to the marble slabs,
while the bodies, naked at last,
as in the hour of water or love,
bristle with the passage of this living god
and tremble at the aroma of Christ the Tiger
devouring the soul's edges,
now so intact, so drunk, such virgins
as when the greying child saw angels
at the hour when Venus burns over Lambeth
and even the prostitutes of Soho become prophets.




Armando Rojas Guardia, Poemas de Quebrada de la Virgen (Caracas: Fundarte, 1985).