Displacement Texts

Antonia Palacios (Caracas, 1904-2001)




To my children Fernán and Elizabeth

Where is the road where light dwelleth,
And wherof is the place of darkness?
JOB: 38:19



They will take all my belongings, all the offerings. The ones that arrived lifted in garlands and branches, the ones that fell lavishing themselves, the ones that remained in suspense, the ones left behind for long fatigues, the ones of learned form, stable touch. They will arrive battling on top of things, on top of the old approximations, forgotten approximations, rolling ruins over land, the tangle barely begun, the pearl barely mounted. They will arrive fiercely, they will arrive with hatred, they will arrive with scorn proclaiming the void. They will strip me of everything: point, gesture, voice. They will suddenly appear amid circles, angles and rectangles, hard geometries of agonizing lines, infinite parallels without possible encounters, volumes of blood. They will strip me of everything, of the air, of the reflection, of the form. The hour will be concave, the sky will be concave, the earth will open its concave crater in the final offering.










It pushes itself, it debates itself, it coils itself, it tears itself, it twists itself, it overturns itself, already penetrates my space, my impenetrable space, touches the alveolas, the dilated pores, the roughest materials, touches the erosions, the erosions that revolve unceasingly in the depths, touches the wounds, the inert wounds, those of the violet humus, the wounded purples, it acosts me, it crumbles me, it fills me with cracks, stuffed with ashes, it throbs me, it shadows me, penetrates in my caverns, my profound caverns open to the void, it hangs from the abyss, rides horseback in the abyss, it shakes me, it suffers me, it cuts me off, it splits me in two halves, it afflicts me, it frightens me, it unhinges me, it drags me, it reflects itself, it advances itself, it plows me, it transits me, it makes me impotent, it blames me, it makes me escape, it agonizes me, oh frozen leap!










One would hope to penetrate the instant without dimensions, without a defined trajectory, the unexpected instant, the exhausted calm, the tenebrous assault. One would hope to penetrate the night, night-island, night-universe descending. One would hope to penetrate the light, surmount illuminated, ascend atop the tumultuous terrain, the rocky solidity, touch white spheres, weightless worlds detached from all density. One would hope to leave behind things, objects. One would hope to abandon the horizon not chosen, leave the places. One would hope to not be in any place, penetrate time in its new, vertiginous rotation, penetrate the signs, the signals. One would hope to not be anywhere. One would hope to not be anywhere and not be in the knotted being, spasmodic being that does not emerge. One would hope to half-open permanence, touch substances, sap, primary delights. One would hope to be a prolongation of the self in the infinite copulation.










A section escapes, trembles, curves. A section detaches herself, negates herself, breathes herself. A section predicts herself, stops to predict herself pensive and in the dark, stops without knowing, detaches herself without knowing, separated from another section, entwined with herself, with the section that thinks herself differently and is the same. A section surrenders, debates herself, a section that seems to free herself scaling the heights, the impalpable heights, who seems to save the horizon on top, high above, who seems protected from the darkest, fastest and coldest winds where the air freezes, a lighter section who seems to float in space, different at times and who is the same. A section is reflected in the other section, the other similar section. A section lodges herself above time in wilderness, above the alone time, a solitary section that looks for herself, trails herself, that looks for herself and doesn't find herself, who cries out for herself, who implores herself, who enters the void, who calls and doesn't answer, an unfortunate section detaches herself... detaches herself... detaches herself... Oh the section that curves me, that trembles me! Oh the section of my own self that denies me, abandons me, that dies!










Like mourning apparel, like the last shred, the last dispossession, trimmings in mourning, fringes that unfringe themselves, immense deep folds, like chopped forests, like sad cities, like naked tables, like deserted beaches, like dogs go by panting, like the air goes by, like the day goes by, like the hours remain lit, threaded, like mourning apparel extended, empty, dusty, withered, where is the radiance, where is the shine, where is the living flame, the distant incandescence, where the transit, where the wandering wait, where the dawning, where the where, where the over there, where? ...here... the night here, the absence here, the nothingness here.










This zigzag of the wind, this air spear, this shadow. This voluptuous agony of the instant, this livened memory, this tear drop that sprouts, this tear drop that falls, this smoke that lifts, hoisted mast, this dark coin, this origin, this chance, this foreign horizon, this shadow, this shadow. This greed of the instant, diminished memory, this petrified tear drop, this shadow, this enclosure, this shadow. This fragility of the air, the stuttering of the wind, wind that stutters, sleeping volcano, evening volcano, this curved sorrow, this destroyed point, this infinite summer, this shadow, this enclosure, this shadow. This bleeding animal, this dispersed blood, these feet, these hands, these eyes, this enclosure, these distances. This receiving of the wind, this negation of the air, this accelerated pulse, this immobile pulsation, this sky so tall, this earth without sky, the air that swings itself, the wind that tears itself up, this rigid report, this enclosure, this shadow, this shadow.










Who lifts the predictions? Who opens the mysteries? Impotent challenge this non-existent announcement, there inside, there in the depths, endlessly there, miserable precision. Who unfolds the solemn doubt? Treading from one ruin to another ruin, touching its weight, weighing even the void, arriving, arriving barely, barely sustained in the repeated forms. Who investigates the walking, the falling, the dying? Oh seized time. Oh abandonment. Who stretches over the sharp edge, in the body, over the sharp edge, over fear, consumed by fear? Its silence of a space, the spaces of silence, and waiting, listening, breathing, divided until breath, pursued, faster, faster, the tides and the quakes, the crumblings, dust whirlwinds, and the days without substance fainting. Who folds herself, unravels herself, silences herself, in doubt's fever?










In the center, in the exact center, concentric circles, formless matter, from the center, sharpened matter, there in the center, the contour palpable in vertigo, in the vertiginous instant that leaves the center behind, occult center, protected, in the late suspense of the instant that arrives in a scattering without contour, without a center, in the highest level where shadow nests, remote center. Far from the center the fluting, the fissures, scattered in convergent contours gathered in the center, and dispersed, faded flashes explode in the center, ephemeral flight, fatigued flight battling in the center's limits, in the center, surrounding the center, oh it's so heavy, oh how I moan, how I abyss myself in this center that folds over, this center that consumes itself, spiral of the center, oh how it oppresses me, dilated center! In the center, already centered, in the center fixed, fixed in the center, pierced by the center, already outside the center.





1973-1975





Antonia Palacios, "Textos del desalojo," Ficciones y aflicciones, Luis Alberto Crespo y Antonio López Ortega, editores (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989).

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).

My Father, the Immigrant

(excerpts)

Vicente Gerbasi (Canoabo, 1913-Caracas, 1992)





I

We come from night and toward night we go.
The earth stays behind wrapped in her vapors,
where the almond tree, the child and the leopard live.
The days stay behind with lakes, reindeer, snow,
with austere volcanoes, with charmed jungles
where fear’s blue shadows hover.
The tombs stay behind at the foot of the cypress,
alone in the sadness of distant stars.
The glories stay behind like pyres that muffle
secular gusts of wind.
The doors stay behind complaining in the wind.
Anguish stays behind with its celestial mirrors.
Time stays behind like tragedy in man:
life-creator, death-creator.
Time who lifts and wastes the columns
and murmurs in oceans’ millenary waves.
The light stays behind washing mountains,
the children’s parks and the white altars.
But also night with its pained cities,
the daily night, what is not yet night,
but instead, brief pause trembling in fireflies
or passing through spirits with agonized fists.
The night that descends again toward light,
waking flowers in taciturn valleys,
refreshing the water coils in the mountains,
launching horses toward blue cliffs,
while eternity, within gold lights,
moves quietly through astral plains.





II

We come from night and toward night we go.
The steps in dust, the blood’s flame,
the forehead’s sweat, the hand on shoulder,
the wail within memory,
everything is shut down by rings of shadow.
Time lifts us with ancient cymbals.
With cymbals, with wine, with laurel branches.
Besides, twilight agreements drop into spirit.
Grief digs with its wolf claws.
Listen inwardly to the infinite echoes,
the enigma’s horns in your distances.
Within rusted iron, there are glimmers into which the spirit
desperately falls,
and stones that have passed through man’s hand,
and lonely sands,
and watery lamentations in river beds at dusk.
Yelling into the abyss, reclaim
that inner gaze moving toward death!
Heliotrope reflections, passionate hands
and dream lightning all repose among the hours.
Come to the deserts and listen to your voice!
Come to the deserts and scream to the skies!
The heart is a calm solitude.
Only love rests between two hands
and descends with a dark murmur in the seed,
like a black torrent, like a blue pollen,
with the tremor of fireflies hovering in a mirror,
or the scream of beasts that break their veins
in avid nights of insomniac solitude.
While the seed brings visible and invisible death.
Summon, summon, summon your lost face
on the shores of that great spectre!





III

Ecstatic lightning between two evenings,
fish swimming through nighttime clouds,
glitter’s pulse, jailed memory,
trembling coin over dark nothingness,
vision facing the shadow: that is us.
The day passes taciturn through the stagnant water
doubling through rushes toward the oblivion vessels.
The spirit trembles quietly in the violets.
Are we not a secret hidden by the hours?
Look how vision is a glimmer of azahares,
in the evening’s architecture,
as the self hides
in the subtle sigh of fronds.
Something ever closes around our forehead.
The stones’ cold courses in our blood.
A murmur of dice descends through valleys.
And always man alone, under the sun and thunders,
chased by voices and whips and teeth.
Always man alone, with his vision, his,
with his memories, his, and his hands, his.
Man questioning his quiet shadows.
Listen: I’m calling you from my solitudes,
from the palm tree districts
opened to the luminous sky signals.
The wind tangles with you in sidereal fogs,
and stops you at the foot of the black birch trees.
Ancient deer from the moon
go running through memory arcades,
and heart flames fall into your silence.





IV

What I feel in my blood like a sand clock,
next to some portrait, from the string and the salt;
what I listen to in my blood like a day’s rumor,
when a night butterfly
arrives to kiss our shadowed heart;
what I listen to in my blood like harp chords,
when everything turns off and everything is a yesterday,
with faces, with ashes and hands in the shadows;
what I listen to like a grain falling,
in the twilight of rooms,
where the autochthonous mirror of confidence
vainly destroys the masks of man:
what I listen to in my blood like sun flutes,
when my children dance around my existence
like a far hill of vintage;
when thought transforms my secrets
into ivied chasms,
and I recline my forehead on nocturnal wine;
when I feel my steps on earth,
and when I say: earth,
and I know that I am here illuminating myself,
loving her and listening to her mandate, which is to exist,
within what secretly descends toward my death;
rumor that sustains and draws me
in my ancient portrait,
with the falcon on the shoulder,
in the penumbra of olive leaves:
mark of conscience,
enigma of old walls,
fallen from light in sadness,
hay in the afternoon, solitude clouds,
night fires in the form of skeletons,
vision toward the jaguar’s shadow.
We are not inhabitants of light.
There are fog tongues and burning signs
dancing around us.
Our vision falls on mourning rings,
in rushes of fear, in stars made from silver.
The lost forehead moves, like a cold flow
through the nightly scarecrow humidity.
When does my dark walking come out of you?
Abyss into which my eyes fall, stays behind.
Man belongs to the night who follows him,
dream that the sun defends,
a parenthetical uncertain wonder,
image that crumbles the fog.
My mother still contemplates your portrait
and a far glimmer begins in her white hair.
I am here on the earth, here on earth,
and in your death, dispersed within my senses.
And eyes persist, flashes of danger.
And the habit of moving by the sound,
by humidity, laughter, fog,
where light rays dance
like reminiscing about familiar deaths.
Everything advances in me and all drops, and all is rumors,
a nearing and love, and a suffering for what’s loved,
and to carry it all toward dream
and making the earth a dream.
And it is what approaches burning, sounding like thunder
above a child,
from your hard life, your lonely death,
your death like wide fields
where night curves her slowness of stars,
with a rumor of helmets, of stones, of skeletons,
with guitars fallen next to the heart,
with a devil’s verse,
with the sulphur of the tyrant Aguirre
dancing in the hills
and distant ancient lightning
in a thicker horizon with flood shadows,
and the winds that sound over the deaf drum
of burning earth,
of the alligator’s water and the poison tooth.
My father, father of this hurricane. And of my poetry.





XIII

Who calls me, who lights up leopard eyes
in the tamarind night?
The guitars quiet down to the mysterious blowing of death,
and the voices hush, and only the kids stay up late.
They are the inhabitants of the night,
when silence spreads throughout the stars,
and the domestic animal moves through the corridors,
and the nocturnal birds visit the village church,
where all the dead pass,
where bloodied saints live.
Through the shadows the headless horses run,
and the sands of the street reach the edges,
where fear gathers its animals of fire.
And it’s the night that shelters existence alone,
in the insomniac child, in the tired ox,
in the curve of the hills, in the radiances
of the rocks and the fern trees facing the stars,
in the mystery where I listen to you,
like a vast solitude of my heart.
My father, father of my shadows.
And of my poetry.





1945





Vicente Gerbasi, "Mi padre, el inmigrante," Antología poética (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1990).

Miami Beach Sunstrokes

(excerpts)

Jacqueline Goldberg (Maracaibo, 1966)










the balcony is a chunk of Collins Avenue

a view
reduced to extremes
no one notices
at lunch

we watch its swim suit blend
we've got towels
tuna sandwiches
Diet Coke

we pause at the dry shot
of an airplane over the bay










Mr. Jones guards exits and entrances

he couldn't have another name
—as a true character
out of English classes—

Mr. Jones is a guachman
ripit egein

Mr. Jones
and his doorman shifts
listens bearer of old corpses
maker of strokes and barters
artificial respirator

Mr. Jones-glassdoor

single entrance









Isaac Baschevitz Singer
spent winters
in the Surfside Tower

we'd see him at his window
two floors down
in checkered shorts and a T-shirt

a nurse
pushed his walker
on certain stretches of the beach

at the time, I couldn't have guessed
the Nobel Laureate chewed gum
and no longer wrote











the kids/of/fourthirty
woke at dawn on the first day of August
to go north on a DC10

over there was minute triumphs on the sand
matchstick heads
given away to the trash

upon return
they wore new clothes
blue chocolates

a certain misery
bronzed with delay










the kids/of/fourthirty
came back in September with bubbles in their mouths

a magic powder
it convened the airs of its other humanity

they spoke of sailboats in bed
happy explosions between their molars

they believed they held the secret of travel

and they did










on vacation there is no house

borrowed apartments
smell of stickers

even after three weeks
when the airport taxi is about to arrive
they demand a certain order
they aspire to contain the substance of mistakes

no one cares about the mended carpet
the trash left behind

the apartment was a beach matter
quick lunches camping stove

if even a niche
minimal catastrophe
convenience of foreign shelter










heating up pizza by microwave at midnight
is a bad omen

boiling water in a bronze baby bottle
weighs the bitter moments

spying on the fat neighbor between shades
warms the ghosts

writing just because
for pure lies
churns the guts
draws smoke
kills the good plagues










Jacqueline Goldberg, Insolaciones en Miami Beach (Caracas: Fundarte, 1995).

Providence

(excerpts)

Rafael Castillo Zapata (Caracas, 1958)





When will we build a pyre with these dark branches and with these thorns, when will we chop up your forehead with axe blows imitating starving invaders?










I love the word lámpara associated to your future. Won’t I see you shine, perhaps, beneath the stars, rescued from your shrouds like a nocturnal bride? Surrounded by bonfires, by flames, your face will light up when your stretched limbs are shaken in the dance. Won’t I see your calves burn like firewood consumed in the fury of the party? Won’t I see you drink until exhaustion? Won’t I see you happy, giving yourself at last to he who marries you, patient groom who receives you so as to renew himself with your blood sleeping beside you?










You'll go uncombed, Providence, torn by the wind. You'll go on showing your meats under tablets and the flowered tapestry. Your soul will be on display. Your cornices will become like fringe on a worn suit. Your granite and your painted timbers (red and saffron) will be useless to you. Your blackboards and your asphalt are useless. I will watch you naked, stranded, thrown aside, and I will embrace you loudly, with rage. You will be mine after no one offers anything for you. Ah, your smile, between chapped lips, will be my reward, your gift of straw, your perfume, your desolation.










What will become of you until dawn? Who will sustain the night's weight with you so it doesn't squash you under its domain?

Stone Rose: may nothing crack you like a vanquished bone. Serve yourself from my hands. Rest beneath the bridge of my arms. Be mine, naked. With our backs turned away from the lightning.










The night and his inverted bonfires have fallen. He is contemplating you, Providence, clearing a path through your spine-thickened forests. Their lights will guide me better than lamps. Toward your furthest shore.










How long have you turned your back to the sea that nibbles your ankles offering you his mouth? How long has it been since you forgot the smell of salt, the black-green rust of his seaweed, the dark invitation of his groans?

I see you from a hill. As if trailing a shipwreck, your wooden planks rot on a grey beach full of dead shrubs and shells.

When will you rise from your sadness, Providence? When will you respond to the insistent smile of the water that barks at you?










The collapsed sky enhances you, Providence. I watch you as much as I can under that light until I tire and mistake your face in its mirage.

I don’t know if you’re really there; if you’re still you; but I love you.

As if under an obliging lamp your signs hidden under the day suddenly reappear, for an instant, and I recover you, pure, fighting the growing night for that unexpected piece of splendor.










I didn’t let myself be confused by your forests, which were calling me with their claws drawn.

I looked for your face amidst everything.

The darkness was not there.










Once again the sky plucked a furious bird over your cornices, Providence. He mocked you. He pierced the air deeply with that already frozen body, he twirled it and scattered a whirlwind of glass at the edge of your throat. Didn’t you hear how that avalanche shook under my steps, while it opened little rivers of blood over the flesh of your name?










All this snow spread out. Such a waste of cloth to cover the sleeping woman who remains silent. To the drowsy woman. To the one made of stone. To the woman married to silence under a handful of dark brambles and branches. Abandoned by the birds. Pale. Bloodless. Unknown.










I’ll move along the edges. Through the hinges where night gives in. Like an animal lit up by the furtive hunter’s lamp, I’ll trap you amidst your shock. Nothing will return you when dawn comes.










This leisure to which you’ve given your hands, without parties, until renouncing your own self, without the memory of your own feelings, robs the light from you in the closing midday’s quicksilver. It relegates you to the shadows as lightning grows in your entrails.

Your loosed hair falls like a dead body.

Your birds, asleep, have forgotten you.










Sleeping fingers await the blood's river beneath cotton.










When will I reach your lips’ vein? When will I finally be able to kneel down there exactly, where your blood buds and your throat’s pale stone lets out smoke to touch the wood of your flesh, beneath whose crust life pulses, darkly, subterranean.










Herds of green stumbling with pollen deserts and multitudes will lift their dark-wood skirts and your tiles, Providence, and you'll unveil your thighs, the skin of your knees bitten by the birds, your ashen ankles washed by the water from the beaches. Storm winds. High Tide.










Rafael Castillo Zapata, Providence (Caracas: Angria Ediciones, 1995).

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).

Above the White Waters of Disappearance

Elizabeth Schön (Caracas, 1921-2007)




The sunken leaf on the sidewalk
is direct cultivation to what we're transiting








To grip the real
its own and original
until staying amid solitude, wind
and that taste of waters
born of the heart
as if one day's breeze
yesterday
and yet another day
today
were the same river
that blood's other, the skin
with soft eyes
sweetly following change








Confidence
if the heart approaches another
and listens to a beating almost as
its very own
The heart
drawn in by previous links
recalls the sunrise
that gave her the farm
with meanderings and the shores
from which to oversee the body's descent
facing the sun's wire fence
and beside the hands wrapped
in the breeze of the bee we couldn't hold








Time and its cup of burdens
filled with our round harvest
like the wind as it drifts on desolate plains
The instant is unknown
when the face will escape
and the bird will intern itself
among the white waters of disappearance








For shadow the sun diminishes routes
man traverses them
until finding that space
of a white rose above the book's ink
bound to another for shadow
which, without any pressure
penetrates the fates' dark mushrooms








The sea does not depart
from its first, abysmal cavity
Man loves the roundness of the face
with shadows trailing him
The fruit lives
inside the cycle's humid stamen
same as that cedar inseparable from blood
with which we'll one day
enter when the body is diluted
to jump inside disappearance's dark cliff








In the flesh-colored gate of the furrows
the splendor of a sun likewise tuned to
the unceasing thread of death
Love goes, touches, continues
until the root rises if someone walks
after the bird's plant
seeking forested waterfalls, thick oaks
ignoring the unseen lintels
of the last depth
already happening quickly and complete








The spaces, the airs, the bodies
do not eliminate the cosmos
The light shakes
City
Beds
The book's pages slip
they close within day
disappear in night's hardness
The end relies on the instant
within the available thread
of the word death
and the word river








Man gathers his shadow
puts it where earth sustains its dwellings
without frightening the bees
or coveting shields, coats of arms
Above the horizon, solitude:
clod that won't bend
because the bird always rises
looking for its original place
The soul otherwise
enters that blue's whiteness
with the last hydrangea's door








Death:
stone that carries off when it punctures us
the inseparable waters of the river we are








The voice does not speak
It lives in the waters' beehive
relinquishing its great untouchable wing
that flowed from the hands
when they could not sustain
Box of days
after its river scent has opened?




Elizabeth Schön, "Sobre las aguas blancas de la desaparición," Del río hondo aquí (Caracas: Editorial Diosa Blanca, 2000).

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).

The Wall

Fernando Paz Castillo (Caracas, 1893-1981)



"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
—John Keats



I
A wall in the afternoon
and in the hour
a white line, indefinite
over the green field
and under the sky.


II
A bird—on the leaf—
has placed its most beautiful song
over the wall.


III
Grieved by its own existence
—stopped amid its brief shadow
and its destiny—
a vulture, beautiful in its distance and flight,
induces anguish in the prophetic soul
a cold anguish, when
accurate, like a defeated arrow
—dark arrow that holds its first impulse—
drops beyond the wall.


IV
Life is a constant
and beautiful destruction:
to live is to do harm.


V
But the wall,
the silent white wall
seems to say:
"Your eyes reach up to here,
duller than your instinct.

I separate your life from other small
lives; though large at sunset,
when the insinuating gold of sunset arrives."


VI
Perhaps beyond the wall,
as high to desire as low to hope,
nothing exists after what is already seen on the road
next to life and death,
the truce and pain
and God's indifferent shadow.


VII
God—a wall facing memories and visions—
is alone, intimately alone
in our eyes
and in the small name
that ties him to things;
to the canary's fraternal silk
song
and to the night in which the vulture flies:
funereal, polished case for yesterday's things, beautiful
or sad
what will be so again
on this side of the wall,
with the recent fear of returning to the source.


VIII
Dying?...
But if nothing is more beautiful in its hour
—facing the wall—
than the dying one's serene eyes,
denied by their own silence;
already lost, amid newfound spikes,
the fear of dying,
and of having lived, as a man, among men,
who barely—darkened in their existence—
understood them.


IX
So then the wall
seems to invade itself amid forgotten anger
and hope:
It is a sudden path, not the border of shadow and song,
facing a new God who awaits us
—who always awaits us—
and who we will not know
even though he follows in our path;
who arrives to us from afar,
astride the light,
and who we leave behind along the path,
like something, which is not earth,
tied, however, to our feet.


X
The wall in the afternoon,
amid the grass, the song and the funereal light:
presence of the pain of living
and not dying;
consolation of returning, in earth and gold,
with the anxiety of having been;
dust and gold that return eternally,
like daily death,
beneath the insomniac night's grain of wheat,
murmuring with high wind
and morning star.
The famished heart feels ecstasy:
the beloved and the heart, timid words
smell, as the wall in the afternoon,
like sky and earth confused,
when dying is our own affair
and, being ours, we love it.
We love it shyly,
silently, without violence,
while others fear—still distant—
the sensitive newborn solitude
for man, inhuman, and his blurred destiny.


XI
Because there is no death only life
on that side of song, on that side of flight,
on that side of time.


XII
Vague intuition of endurance
facing the dark and
ambitious death...
Because death, an image of us
and our creature,
is not the same as non-life
which has never existed.
Since God's verb, which has placed all
in man's conscience, could not create death
without his own death and his quiet nostalgia
for thinking and suffering human forms.


XIII
The afternoon's wall—dusk in our afternoon—,
is barely a white line beside the field
and beside the sky.
Mysterious cross that only shows
its horizontal arm.
Joined, by its dark root,
to the very earth of its blurred origin;
and to the sky of escape
by song and the wing:
the vulture's impassive night
and the canary's gold path
toward sunset.


XIV
The wall!
How I feel its silence and how it weighs
—in my afternoon—
in the moss's afternoon
and the prayer
and the return.


XV
I only know there is a wall,
beautiful in its quiet solitude of sky and time:
And everything, beside it, is a miracle.


XVI
I only fear in the golden afternoon—in my afternoon—
for the agonizing sun; and for something that is not sun,
also agonizing in my conscience,
sometimes desolate
and sometimes confused by surprise!
I only fear having seen something:
the same!
the field, the lawn;
the same sensual rose that reminds me of certain lips
and the same exhausted lily
guarding death.


XVII
And facing God and his Destiny, I only feel
I have passed by the wall once
along its thick quiet shadow,
on that side of time.




1964




Fernando Paz Castillo, "El muro," Poesía, Selección, prólogo y cronología de Oscar Sambrano Urdaneta (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1986).

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).