Prayers to an Absent God

(excerpts)

Martha Kornblith (Lima, Peru 1959-Caracas, Venezuela 1997)




That's why we dedicate our books
to the dead.
Because we carry the hopeless conviction
they listen to us.
We, accomplices to
less innocent careers,
believe we will be gods
in other worlds
because we think happiness
is the miracle's distance
when we dream of one word,
when we watch airplanes rising.








That's why I became a poet
because time passes slowly in solitude.
Isn’t it merely a dangerous moment
maintains our composure?
Doesn't madness depend
on our single, fragile chord?
Doesn't she lean on one term alone,
on the exact term,
that saves
or damns us?








This memory astride eternity's breadth,
that absent presence,
that memory that disrespects the body
(death leaves without saying goodbye).
This anguish of inability,
this asphyxiation.








That poet who stares at me.
Every night
he leaves class,
explains a verse,
shoos the flies away from the water fountain,
drinks a sip,
shakes off his blue jeans.
And he keeps doing this, always
sad,
concise.
Sometimes
the audience cheers,
and he searches his pockets,
sinking his forehead into the theater box
while I think:
Him
and the blank page.








I've seen a poet write
about poetry's uselessness.
They become, at the end of their lives,
chaotic and telluric,
they reflect on the cosmos,
they denigrate the poem, for the right reasons,
while their hands shake
over the glass of whisky
and they return to the initial torment
that expands now into our dedications.
They sleep over their book covers
but they no longer conspire, like others in the salons.
Good and visionary
they never confess their disaster,
they are above the end of the world.
They weep because the word has become stupid
and they wonder if the wait has been legitimate.








Inexorable
you finally open,
quick as a kiss
planted in darkness,
that way of anticipating
phrases that have to do
with time.
That sad knowledge converges in you
(I accuse a lone melancholy),
you have that illustrious manner of appearing
submerged within the intertext,
but it's crucial to delay
these verses on time,
you reached the end impeccably
(your discourse awaits, avid for hours).








Will this insistent brick tone never stop:
the tedious road that leads
to another artificial sandwich?
Maybe when the dull lights of
Orlando City turn on
and the tourists consume their final dollar.
There will never be an accident for the smile
that religiously wishes "Good day."
The same song will converge
throughout all corners of the road:
Baby, I'm burned by your fire,
while the sun howls at each approaching gas station.
Everything so
stubborn.








I remain, staring at the word,
the ruins my first verse began,
only things speaking themselves forever and never,
there will be no more talent emerging from the fragments,
only the others' letters announce a disaster.








Martha Kornblith, Oraciones para un dios ausente (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1995).