Air over the Air

(excerpts)

Juan Sánchez Peláez (Altagracia de Orituco, 1922-Caracas, 2003)




I

A round horse enters
my house after wandering for so long
in the fields

a brown and drunken horse with
many spots in the shade
and with such a voice, my God.

I told him: you will not lick my hand,
wandering star of the specters.

And that was enough. I didn’t see him again. He
had left. Because the specters
cannot be mentioned to the horse
not even for the duration of a
brief, vertiginous lightning bolt.









III

César Moro, beautiful and humbled,
playing a harp in the outskirts of Lima
said to me: come into my house, poet
always ask for air, clear sky
because we have to die some day, it’s understood
we have to be born, and you are already dead
the floor will always stay here, wide and mute
but to die from the same family is to have been born.









IV

Tomorrow will portion what crude flavor, dense
the night

looks in already, without placing any distance

how that thunder sounds and dreams

and samples the earth of our abyss

and asks:

what is there due north, due south

the dark or instead the luminous

or maybe our shelter

maybe disgrace

what armor

tough, light on our shoulders

sustains and carries us today?









V

Stay calm if I take a step toward the
garden and the desert

and may our life and death stay calm

tremors of the fresh, enormous breeze calling

should I answer?
will you let me?

our bread tree is the spirit going far

—agreed

those tremulous tremors that lull

silence and silence

—I trust them.









VI

Maybe Ezra Pound has a workshop in the beyond
or smiles frequently at the immense tenderness
of Gerard de Nerval. The universal American might
say when looking at clouds: “These hairy dogs
belong to us.” But then the angels will see
his maritime and almond heart. And they will find
in the dark, further down, as if pouring from the earth,
exploding in the air, a thin splendorous fan.
Ezra Pound’s mouth will taste that sweet fruit again
(the blackberry), that piece chewed with the women
he loved; and he will open sacks full of oatmeal, grass,
plenty of oatmeal, plenty of grass with infinite mornings to
keep us all nourished and awake.









VIII

By our time
laugh and cry
now is the time

by nothing and all
now is our time

I hear
a first and second kettledrum chorus

do you hear them, yes or no?
—arriving and flying

in double threes with their hours
playing the main drum come the waves
hear them and feel a touch:
calling, roaring, creaking
over valleys and mountain ranges

clear and white time
warm and naked nothing
they also become leisure
—pure water
and strange world our world
and the other sphere.




Juan Sánchez Peláez, Aire sobre el aire (Caracas: Tierra de Gracia Editores, 1989).