The Residents

Alfredo Silva Estrada (Caracas, 1933-2009)




1
The residents project their shadow
On the walls of a happier city

They don't stop at the threshold
They create it
From roots stirring at their steps
With the sometimes dramatic gestures
Of a radiant interim

Their hands guide ivy that rises slowly
Engendering airs made rhythmic by the fervor of the invisible
By love's breathing

In that still nameless zeal
They make every evocation carry a future name

While sustaining incredible aisles
Precincts where mirrored echoes flower and rebound
Meagerly real

Thus, for intervals, the residents surprise us
When we inhabit the silence of patient signs
And the first persuasion of the light grazing our skin


2

C'est le repos éclairé
Rimbaud

In the city that plots cruelty and sweetness
—Lines of soft hills with shackled smoke—

In the day's plot between-season
The residents create space

Space of reinforcement incorporated to the body

They suscitate it, they irradiate it
From the illumined leisure or the ardent vigil

They trust the sudden short cuts of chance
And the slowly observed pathways

They live the smooth colors between breaches
They propel them on dream slopes

They capture the aromatic volumes
They savor the new hours ' branches

Hungry for the sound that changes oblivion
They smell symbols and embody silences


3
The residents know the leisure of being
The exaltation of light

When they quiet
They exist in the extension of the hand

The residents wait
While false exiles deny all hope


4
The residents know, feel
That we depend even on the stars

And that the humbled dust
Can equal the sun's free will

Even the diamond
Forever imperfect

But, who knows!
Who among us knows with certainty?

Familiar colors
Ascending from depths

While a blonde sun sings, sings
With the black brother singing in the arteries


5
The residents have time
Time to be interior

Exalted
But without oblivion

The residents meditate the morning
And awaken dawn faunas


6
The residents baptize chance
And give it sweet vowel names

Of virgin consonants

Bodies that speak each other in this light
Labial and resonant


7
The residents assume faces wrought by language

Faces, speeches ascending from earth

They don't sublimate themselves
And yet they have so much air

So many sleeping, tamed, loose gusts

With exultant iris and tender fire
They maintain shelter and frighten terror


8
From your house, resident
You prolong horizons and thickets

The day's breaches
Dream tubers

In your sleeplessness and your rapture you center
The scales of successive attachments and glimmers

For you the daily unseen flora—so above and alongside—
Affirmed in love's secret threads


9
With dream fragments
Rough, like cactus
Light, like spores

With excess of collected reality
—The woman at the door
And towards the end
The bread's consecration, haystack temples

With fragments and excess
These and those between rivers and mirrors
Shredding likenesses

You suffer the fragmentary, resident

You consume roughness and the sporadic

And you lavish the light
Quadrant of cardinal elements


10
We who name the common places
Barely naming births and deaths

Disorienting chasms
Reiterating silences

We find the leaking extremities of voices
And an infinite sense in opened hands


11
They left me no legacy of shadows

They live inside me, for them

They, the lightning ones
The sleepless free

(Their tender resurgence, constellated by absences)

And then, because of them
The canto hurts

It hurts me to celebrate the buds dawning
Next to a river when someone agonizes

But the poem carries its moss

And carries us in its fluency

To where the wild planetary edges
Sink into memory with their exploding flowers




1970-1974




Alfredo Silva Estrada, "Los moradores," Acercamientos (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992).