My Father, the Immigrant: XIII
Vicente Gerbasi (Canoabo, 1913-Caracas, 1992)
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)
3.04.2007
Prelude
José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Cumaná, Venezuela 1890 - Geneva, Switzerland 1930)
I want to exist amid empty darkness, because the world damages my senses cruelly and life afflicts me, impertinent lover whispering bitter stories.
By then my memories will have abandoned me: now they flee and return with a rhythm of ceaseless waves, they are wolves howling in the night shrouding desert snows.
Reality’s disturbed symbol, movement respects my fantastic asylum; moreover, I will have scaled it with death at my arm. She is a white Beatrice, and, standing on the crescent of the moon, she will visit my painful sea. Under her spell I will repose forever and I will no longer lament offended beauty or impossible love.
La torre de Timón, 1925
(José Antonio Ramos Sucre, "Preludio," Antología poética, ed. Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1969)
I want to exist amid empty darkness, because the world damages my senses cruelly and life afflicts me, impertinent lover whispering bitter stories.
By then my memories will have abandoned me: now they flee and return with a rhythm of ceaseless waves, they are wolves howling in the night shrouding desert snows.
Reality’s disturbed symbol, movement respects my fantastic asylum; moreover, I will have scaled it with death at my arm. She is a white Beatrice, and, standing on the crescent of the moon, she will visit my painful sea. Under her spell I will repose forever and I will no longer lament offended beauty or impossible love.
La torre de Timón, 1925
(José Antonio Ramos Sucre, "Preludio," Antología poética, ed. Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1969)
1.01.2007
Memories and Rain
Ludovico Silva (Caracas, 1937-1988)
One evening, in Saint Germain of the Fields
so long ago already, Paris, so long ago
it strayed from my memory
and has become a chunk of quartz,
a night where the streets of Paris
were full of poet corpses
rotting in the Metro vents,
I emerged trembling from my shelter on Cuyas Street
and went out to find death.
Dragging myself, I arrived like an ancient marble
at the café of Saint Germain of the Fields
where skeletons accumulated
alongside the moribund bodies of revolutionaries and the bourgeoisie.
The bomb’s explosion had been atrocious, molecular,
and the only things left standing were
bottles of wine and an old waiter
who poured my bottle sadly.
I couldn’t take it any more.
Strange messages came to me from the galaxies,
from a region where beings are made purely out of gas,
terrifying messages came to me, like this one:
“Everything, everything is ultimately fatal, even chance!”
Then, accompanied by my bottle
in whose depths sang Baudelaire
I grabbed my notebook and wrote:
“My great torment is: I want to live eternally!”
I thought I would die from life itself or from premonitions
on that night of my twentieth year.
I was in love with a blue-eyed woman,
a small French woman from Melun.
I had been happy with her until I fell in love.
From that moment onwards
she mistreated, used and left me like a dog.
I cried so much at the Monsieur Le Prince,
I walked so much, like a lunatic,
without wanting to return to my shelter. I had no money,
but, regardless, I had to give a few Francs
to a hallucinating Algerian who asked for them,
gun in hand.
Suddenly, it began to rain like shit from the skies
and I remembered the rains in my distant country,
where the universal flood is reborn every year
and where we have to build Noah’s Ark
each year. My poetic metaphors
say absolutely nothing
in the face of those vertical rivers,
those crying storms
that fall from the heights
and later roll through the eyes of the miserable,
the homeless, who own nothing besides death.
That was me on this rainy St. Germain night,
falling through the streets of Paris.
Paris! City or coin fallen from those heights
like a piece of gold
stained with divine filth.
I never knew you, city, and I never will
because you were too cruel to me,
like a woman with a whip and fangs.
I loved, suffered, died, wrote transcendental stupidities there,
but nothing remains besides pure, fragmented memory,
the remembrance of a remembrance.
I will never see you again,
but you still hurt me
and above all those blue, murderous eyes.
Now, after so many years
since escaping St. Germain and St. Michelle,
I find myself in a city of red rain storms
and in a city full of corpses.
But not poet corpses,
because the poets here protect themselves very well,
but instead the corpses of the shirtless, the miserable, the unemployed.
This hematopoetic poem is for them,
made of blood and spleen.
For them, for whom I have never truly fought
despite having written many violent books
that should be burned
so as to produce so much as a smoke signal
that says: “I want to live eternally!”
In that tenebrous season of St. Germain of the Fields
a wise friend said to me: “If you only write about shadows,
your only memory will be of shadows.”
He was right. It is my only option.
I don’t recognize any metaphor other than death.
She’s like a prism
that illuminates every angle of my life.
Dying is less important,
what is important is learning how to die.
I will go on dying like a snail,
walking until the end, without hurry or pause,
and I only ask of Sister Death
she allow me to arrive with my funereal prose
at the fixed terminal set for me
by those three women up there who weave.
Everything else is pure sound and color.
I see mountains crumble,
I see poets screaming under the mud of the cliffs,
I see volcanoes vomit God’s irony,
I see how time approaches like an iron bull,
I see Mozart and Glück singing in my fields,
I see myself at last like a specter,
like a sign for those around me,
an ivory body with a hint of gold in the sick eyes,
a few broken poems, a few good verses,
some jewel smiling in the darkness.
Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem.
(Ludovico Silva, "Recuerdos y lluvia," Papel Literario, El Nacional, 1986)
One evening, in Saint Germain of the Fields
so long ago already, Paris, so long ago
it strayed from my memory
and has become a chunk of quartz,
a night where the streets of Paris
were full of poet corpses
rotting in the Metro vents,
I emerged trembling from my shelter on Cuyas Street
and went out to find death.
Dragging myself, I arrived like an ancient marble
at the café of Saint Germain of the Fields
where skeletons accumulated
alongside the moribund bodies of revolutionaries and the bourgeoisie.
The bomb’s explosion had been atrocious, molecular,
and the only things left standing were
bottles of wine and an old waiter
who poured my bottle sadly.
I couldn’t take it any more.
Strange messages came to me from the galaxies,
from a region where beings are made purely out of gas,
terrifying messages came to me, like this one:
“Everything, everything is ultimately fatal, even chance!”
Then, accompanied by my bottle
in whose depths sang Baudelaire
I grabbed my notebook and wrote:
“My great torment is: I want to live eternally!”
I thought I would die from life itself or from premonitions
on that night of my twentieth year.
I was in love with a blue-eyed woman,
a small French woman from Melun.
I had been happy with her until I fell in love.
From that moment onwards
she mistreated, used and left me like a dog.
I cried so much at the Monsieur Le Prince,
I walked so much, like a lunatic,
without wanting to return to my shelter. I had no money,
but, regardless, I had to give a few Francs
to a hallucinating Algerian who asked for them,
gun in hand.
Suddenly, it began to rain like shit from the skies
and I remembered the rains in my distant country,
where the universal flood is reborn every year
and where we have to build Noah’s Ark
each year. My poetic metaphors
say absolutely nothing
in the face of those vertical rivers,
those crying storms
that fall from the heights
and later roll through the eyes of the miserable,
the homeless, who own nothing besides death.
That was me on this rainy St. Germain night,
falling through the streets of Paris.
Paris! City or coin fallen from those heights
like a piece of gold
stained with divine filth.
I never knew you, city, and I never will
because you were too cruel to me,
like a woman with a whip and fangs.
I loved, suffered, died, wrote transcendental stupidities there,
but nothing remains besides pure, fragmented memory,
the remembrance of a remembrance.
I will never see you again,
but you still hurt me
and above all those blue, murderous eyes.
Now, after so many years
since escaping St. Germain and St. Michelle,
I find myself in a city of red rain storms
and in a city full of corpses.
But not poet corpses,
because the poets here protect themselves very well,
but instead the corpses of the shirtless, the miserable, the unemployed.
This hematopoetic poem is for them,
made of blood and spleen.
For them, for whom I have never truly fought
despite having written many violent books
that should be burned
so as to produce so much as a smoke signal
that says: “I want to live eternally!”
In that tenebrous season of St. Germain of the Fields
a wise friend said to me: “If you only write about shadows,
your only memory will be of shadows.”
He was right. It is my only option.
I don’t recognize any metaphor other than death.
She’s like a prism
that illuminates every angle of my life.
Dying is less important,
what is important is learning how to die.
I will go on dying like a snail,
walking until the end, without hurry or pause,
and I only ask of Sister Death
she allow me to arrive with my funereal prose
at the fixed terminal set for me
by those three women up there who weave.
Everything else is pure sound and color.
I see mountains crumble,
I see poets screaming under the mud of the cliffs,
I see volcanoes vomit God’s irony,
I see how time approaches like an iron bull,
I see Mozart and Glück singing in my fields,
I see myself at last like a specter,
like a sign for those around me,
an ivory body with a hint of gold in the sick eyes,
a few broken poems, a few good verses,
some jewel smiling in the darkness.
Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem.
(Ludovico Silva, "Recuerdos y lluvia," Papel Literario, El Nacional, 1986)
1.04.2006
The Exile Notebooks
Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930)
I belonged to a town of big snake eaters, sensual, vehement, quiet and able to go mad with love. But my race was of a different lineage. It is written and known—or supposed—by those who occupy themselves in reading signs that are not expressly manifested that their austerity had a proverbial nature. It was possible to notice it, rummaging a bit through the history of human collapse, in the doorways of houses, in their suits, in their words. That is where I get my taste for gloomy bedrooms, half-closed doors, exquisitely crafted furniture, plastered basements, exhausting caves, playing cards where the face of a banished king is bored.
My ancestors had never danced under the light of the moon, they were incapable of reading the signs of birds in the sky like dark commandments of extermination, they didn't know the value of eminent earthly splendor, they were immune to curses and too inept to understand the major ceremonies the chronicles of my town meticulously register, in a crude but vigorous style.
Ah! I descended from barbarians who had stolen from adjacent nations certain refinement of manners, but my fate was decided by semi-savage priests who, adorned with bright red tunics, made predictions from rocks shaded by giant palm trees.
But they—my ancestors—were definitely shackled by immemorial rigidities at the point of the spirit, they were elastic, swift and sure of their bodies.
I did not inherit their virtues.
I am awkward, I walk slowly and balancing myself with my shoulders and advancing, not clumsily, but more with a morose movement, one foot, then another; the quiet madness protects me from blandness keeping me alert like the faithful soldier who has been entrusted with guarding his platoon, and like a shade, I survive within indecision.
Regardless, I thought I was marked by high endeavors that in time would demolish me.
On the other side of the dice, I will relate not without fabulations my course through a land of ignominy and sweetness, ruptures and meetings, splendors and collapses.
A horoscope appointed me to a full existence, though bound with torment.
I carried no message. My pretensions were minimal. The edges of dream settled within me next to the edges of fear. When I came into the use of reason the sorcerers frightened me with predictions of inevitable future unfoldings.
Their revelations have been fulfilled. One day the shifting of faces began. One supplanted another, unceassingly. One day they were a hundred, the next, a thousand; all of them played out a scene of the possessed on my shoulders. Where was the face my parents bequeathed me? Maybe between anguished wedding sheets or in front of unanswering mirrors that the eyes of a cruel damsel set on fire or in the memory of a woman who still sacrifices seagulls to evoke me? My face, where was it? I had to admit, after painful evidence, I had lost it.
The fog would give it back to me.
I was not the same. Reiterated failures had branded my forehead. I forgot the language. I felt inept for love. Implacable anguish bound my breathing. My fertile propensities were annulled by intermittent snow storms. I had turned primitive, inextricable and perverse as a child. I conformed my actions with simple ceremonies, just like a savage. I was silent as a pilot. And like a smuggler I had abolished trust.
My remains piled up like the colors of an unarmed island amid tornadoes that no one could conjure.
I was the guardian of my own disgrace.
The inhabitant of a world populated by senseless imaginations, the marks of the journeys I had undertaken to sacred regions, against prudent warnings, remained on my hands.
At night, under the stalking of uneasy dreams, I would awaken with a grain of salt on my forehead. Unaided like the first infant, crossed throughout by incurable fears, taken and brought back by a force not yet identified, I tended the last coals into the human fire. Dissolution. My head fell chopped by a hurricane leaf.
I have fled. I proclaim my flight, generous heroes, but I am here. You and I are sentenced to glorify old wounds and to return our daily corpse to the waters. We truly remain. No one can escape. Everyone burns on the fire of their perplexities and their incoherence. One must accept the flaming iron of birth like the shore from which we don't leave. We will remain in this circle that opens in the morning and closes at night, devouring our mirrors with volcanic jaws. And it is not enough to arrive at the river and say: "Give me back the gold hatchet with which my nanny gave away the purple days" and then wait in the lauded margins, nor to squander our inspirations to the fog, nor to close like a coffin, in allegiance with night, the unspeakable raptures, like a day or an eyelid is closed. Impossible to flee. We are prisoners of a loving or defiant glance shackled by days the color of hake and our inability to name. Death is a nebula from where we return to visit our possessions. Sleep does not exist. There is only that hole we leave when we move so that swelling or shrinking it someone else might occupy it. Regardless, we talk.
But the edge of obsession is a face.
In the whirlwind of my native premonitions, during the first migrations of the fatidic birds, at the demand of the segregated bodies, I saw it under a triumphal dome. Afterward was the rotation around its aura and later the false ablation, beneath the sign of death, which was to continue, because love is not discontinuous, nor can it be pushed or stopped at will like a sedan. And always inside it a body nourishes itself against another.
A sorcerer, who officiated between the walls of a green chamber, told me: Cut the ties of Orion. The two stars of the chest, the one that closes the waist, the un-treaded roses of your feet and the one belonging to Can, the most dangerous one.
The best fate for many beings is...is...to have lost reason. Your illness has hereditary causes and psychic motivations. Your fear can destroy you. You should be on guard. Avoid wandering, delirious blackness, nightly terrors. Strengthen your body and spirit like a dancer. Speak with all types of people.
You react well to adverse situations, but not to those that can bring you happiness. Do you feel you've lost your memory? The best fate...the best fate...(here my heart, precisely here it felt lulled and wanted to smile)...el mejor destino...The psychic deed is a dynamic force. It can act like any chemical substance. Harden yourself. Read Whitman, Nietzsche, Mayakovsky. Enter into commerce with nature. Doing this frequently can calm you after several moons.
In varied tone and within the sphere of stellar precisions, gradually built up, the sapient enchanter of the loveless gave me notices, proferred warnings, marked paths. Myself, refined, slow-moving like an actor who trusts his own means, careful with gestures like one who knows he is being observed, amid grave anticipations, I destroyed my cars of fire.
And I cursed my fortune, insulted humanity with vituperations, abused my sweet tongue that inhabited me and oppressed me.
I was hopeless. I laid down every day with a fictitious death. Fearful of numbers, signs, combinations, of the previous and next minute, of symbols, letters, lamb’s blood; full of arbitrary associations, abandoned by reality, by words and their links, by silence and its separations, by the frighteningly sweet couplings, by the playing cards and the seasons, I decided to seek out new faces.
1960
Rafael Cadenas, Los cuadernos del destierro (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2001).
I belonged to a town of big snake eaters, sensual, vehement, quiet and able to go mad with love. But my race was of a different lineage. It is written and known—or supposed—by those who occupy themselves in reading signs that are not expressly manifested that their austerity had a proverbial nature. It was possible to notice it, rummaging a bit through the history of human collapse, in the doorways of houses, in their suits, in their words. That is where I get my taste for gloomy bedrooms, half-closed doors, exquisitely crafted furniture, plastered basements, exhausting caves, playing cards where the face of a banished king is bored.
My ancestors had never danced under the light of the moon, they were incapable of reading the signs of birds in the sky like dark commandments of extermination, they didn't know the value of eminent earthly splendor, they were immune to curses and too inept to understand the major ceremonies the chronicles of my town meticulously register, in a crude but vigorous style.
Ah! I descended from barbarians who had stolen from adjacent nations certain refinement of manners, but my fate was decided by semi-savage priests who, adorned with bright red tunics, made predictions from rocks shaded by giant palm trees.
But they—my ancestors—were definitely shackled by immemorial rigidities at the point of the spirit, they were elastic, swift and sure of their bodies.
I did not inherit their virtues.
I am awkward, I walk slowly and balancing myself with my shoulders and advancing, not clumsily, but more with a morose movement, one foot, then another; the quiet madness protects me from blandness keeping me alert like the faithful soldier who has been entrusted with guarding his platoon, and like a shade, I survive within indecision.
Regardless, I thought I was marked by high endeavors that in time would demolish me.
On the other side of the dice, I will relate not without fabulations my course through a land of ignominy and sweetness, ruptures and meetings, splendors and collapses.
A horoscope appointed me to a full existence, though bound with torment.
I carried no message. My pretensions were minimal. The edges of dream settled within me next to the edges of fear. When I came into the use of reason the sorcerers frightened me with predictions of inevitable future unfoldings.
Their revelations have been fulfilled. One day the shifting of faces began. One supplanted another, unceassingly. One day they were a hundred, the next, a thousand; all of them played out a scene of the possessed on my shoulders. Where was the face my parents bequeathed me? Maybe between anguished wedding sheets or in front of unanswering mirrors that the eyes of a cruel damsel set on fire or in the memory of a woman who still sacrifices seagulls to evoke me? My face, where was it? I had to admit, after painful evidence, I had lost it.
The fog would give it back to me.
I was not the same. Reiterated failures had branded my forehead. I forgot the language. I felt inept for love. Implacable anguish bound my breathing. My fertile propensities were annulled by intermittent snow storms. I had turned primitive, inextricable and perverse as a child. I conformed my actions with simple ceremonies, just like a savage. I was silent as a pilot. And like a smuggler I had abolished trust.
My remains piled up like the colors of an unarmed island amid tornadoes that no one could conjure.
I was the guardian of my own disgrace.
The inhabitant of a world populated by senseless imaginations, the marks of the journeys I had undertaken to sacred regions, against prudent warnings, remained on my hands.
At night, under the stalking of uneasy dreams, I would awaken with a grain of salt on my forehead. Unaided like the first infant, crossed throughout by incurable fears, taken and brought back by a force not yet identified, I tended the last coals into the human fire. Dissolution. My head fell chopped by a hurricane leaf.
I have fled. I proclaim my flight, generous heroes, but I am here. You and I are sentenced to glorify old wounds and to return our daily corpse to the waters. We truly remain. No one can escape. Everyone burns on the fire of their perplexities and their incoherence. One must accept the flaming iron of birth like the shore from which we don't leave. We will remain in this circle that opens in the morning and closes at night, devouring our mirrors with volcanic jaws. And it is not enough to arrive at the river and say: "Give me back the gold hatchet with which my nanny gave away the purple days" and then wait in the lauded margins, nor to squander our inspirations to the fog, nor to close like a coffin, in allegiance with night, the unspeakable raptures, like a day or an eyelid is closed. Impossible to flee. We are prisoners of a loving or defiant glance shackled by days the color of hake and our inability to name. Death is a nebula from where we return to visit our possessions. Sleep does not exist. There is only that hole we leave when we move so that swelling or shrinking it someone else might occupy it. Regardless, we talk.
But the edge of obsession is a face.
In the whirlwind of my native premonitions, during the first migrations of the fatidic birds, at the demand of the segregated bodies, I saw it under a triumphal dome. Afterward was the rotation around its aura and later the false ablation, beneath the sign of death, which was to continue, because love is not discontinuous, nor can it be pushed or stopped at will like a sedan. And always inside it a body nourishes itself against another.
A sorcerer, who officiated between the walls of a green chamber, told me: Cut the ties of Orion. The two stars of the chest, the one that closes the waist, the un-treaded roses of your feet and the one belonging to Can, the most dangerous one.
The best fate for many beings is...is...to have lost reason. Your illness has hereditary causes and psychic motivations. Your fear can destroy you. You should be on guard. Avoid wandering, delirious blackness, nightly terrors. Strengthen your body and spirit like a dancer. Speak with all types of people.
You react well to adverse situations, but not to those that can bring you happiness. Do you feel you've lost your memory? The best fate...the best fate...(here my heart, precisely here it felt lulled and wanted to smile)...el mejor destino...The psychic deed is a dynamic force. It can act like any chemical substance. Harden yourself. Read Whitman, Nietzsche, Mayakovsky. Enter into commerce with nature. Doing this frequently can calm you after several moons.
In varied tone and within the sphere of stellar precisions, gradually built up, the sapient enchanter of the loveless gave me notices, proferred warnings, marked paths. Myself, refined, slow-moving like an actor who trusts his own means, careful with gestures like one who knows he is being observed, amid grave anticipations, I destroyed my cars of fire.
And I cursed my fortune, insulted humanity with vituperations, abused my sweet tongue that inhabited me and oppressed me.
I was hopeless. I laid down every day with a fictitious death. Fearful of numbers, signs, combinations, of the previous and next minute, of symbols, letters, lamb’s blood; full of arbitrary associations, abandoned by reality, by words and their links, by silence and its separations, by the frighteningly sweet couplings, by the playing cards and the seasons, I decided to seek out new faces.
I have disembarked like a new day. But the breath that sustains me is joined with other beaches.
Meanwhile my poverty is covered up here in high forms.
I suffer the illness of making my enemies giants.
Afflicting hosts of disorder, I will take back the line in flight. I will use another name.
I will get rid of accomplices. I will judge myself harshly.
Everything is clearer. Regardless, a slight movement is all that is needed to fall into confusion. A brief expansion of the body and chaos is reborn. It is present like a multitude of sharpened edges.
Still the clearest objects wear a shroud to confuse the exiled.
A step away from happiness, I flee from it denying its whiteness, vilifying its courtesy, reproaching its lightness.
Supreme politeness of life, I have broken with the light.
I am left with the recourse of caresses, even if they’re false.
Surviving softness, the beautiful lashes me.
I have refused to transit through roads of grace. Let darkness be. I will conform to my nature like the sunflower to the flame. I will be an arc docile to the tensions. I will fill myself with servitude at the demand of weak imposition. But I want within me a flowering, insurmountable, ductile angle where I might reign undisturbed, to retreat there when the temporal liquor is tasteless and there are no more confines to trespass. Sheltered by such limits I will open my house to travelers.
1960
Rafael Cadenas, Los cuadernos del destierro (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2001).
12.04.2005
Sky, Your Big Arch
Hanni Ossott (Caracas, 1946-2002)
If it doesn't come
if it doesn't arrive
let it be
That is there, always
like a convocation
If it doesn't come
wait
The moon's song has its time.
October 1987
This anguish
for the Egyptian poet
the old one, the most archaic one
the one who saw the Nile's cobalt blue
the black blue
This shame
for his already forgotten word
amidst the desert's infinite sands
My head
placed there
at the shores of what thinks and expands
Knowing God
Knowing the stars
My mind, swollen like a sphere
palpitating
sonorous
for a vastness much too big for me
My heart
pulsing in weeping
for the small and insignificant
My hands, already weakened
duplicated in the mistake
My eyes, useless, trembling
before what I don't know.
December 1987
My Hands
My hands
My hands on my body
the ring, the rings
the wrinkles, the lines
the tension in the seizure
the secret, the secrets
the unspoken word
Him, there
like an embrace
like tensed love
and the house there
in the hand
at hand
the marks, the tracks,
my vegetable feather
my veins
the sarcasms, the moles
the rivers of profanity
My hand
furrowed by rivers
bleeding
voluptuous
swollen
filled with hills and entrails
of whites and reds
lines and crevices
My hand, my hands
December 1987
This, the quotidian
the small, flush with
for magnifying the big
for reverence and weeping
for God.
This, the specular
that sideways...
the little cat.
The call
the reverent convocation
That seat
that sacred perch
for what no longer has any skin
nor blood.
December 1987
God kneel down before me
the blue crosses me
Kiss me
My eyes glimpse at you.
March 1988
Pity
My heart
is trembling
asking
for the words
the voracious words
a man's glance
his disembodied gestures
the moon and splendor
the boredoms.
Enumerations.
All because of the mystery crossing me.
The interrogation.
May 1988
Party
And everyone
destroyed in the party
lying.
By axe blows.
Godless.
In a useless chatter.
June 1988
Sky, your big arch
and what of me?
June 1988
Because of the Undifferentiated
Of a coarse voice the earth
in cracks
with the fissure aloft
shouting
furiously
because of the detail
the edges
the mixtures.
Her angrily
because of the undifferentiated
the promiscuous junctures
June 1988
Nobody
Some flowers for the table
for the earth
the opaque sky
the music
Some petals, pollen, waters
for melancholy
A desert, in back
silence, gravity
and nobody, nobody
June 1988
Hanni Ossott, Cielo, tu arco grande (Caracas: Tierra de Gracia Editores, 1989).
If it doesn't come
if it doesn't arrive
let it be
That is there, always
like a convocation
If it doesn't come
wait
The moon's song has its time.
October 1987
This anguish
for the Egyptian poet
the old one, the most archaic one
the one who saw the Nile's cobalt blue
the black blue
This shame
for his already forgotten word
amidst the desert's infinite sands
My head
placed there
at the shores of what thinks and expands
Knowing God
Knowing the stars
My mind, swollen like a sphere
palpitating
sonorous
for a vastness much too big for me
My heart
pulsing in weeping
for the small and insignificant
My hands, already weakened
duplicated in the mistake
My eyes, useless, trembling
before what I don't know.
December 1987
My Hands
My hands
My hands on my body
the ring, the rings
the wrinkles, the lines
the tension in the seizure
the secret, the secrets
the unspoken word
Him, there
like an embrace
like tensed love
and the house there
in the hand
at hand
the marks, the tracks,
my vegetable feather
my veins
the sarcasms, the moles
the rivers of profanity
My hand
furrowed by rivers
bleeding
voluptuous
swollen
filled with hills and entrails
of whites and reds
lines and crevices
My hand, my hands
December 1987
This, the quotidian
the small, flush with
for magnifying the big
for reverence and weeping
for God.
This, the specular
that sideways...
the little cat.
The call
the reverent convocation
That seat
that sacred perch
for what no longer has any skin
nor blood.
December 1987
God kneel down before me
the blue crosses me
Kiss me
My eyes glimpse at you.
March 1988
Pity
My heart
is trembling
asking
for the words
the voracious words
a man's glance
his disembodied gestures
the moon and splendor
the boredoms.
Enumerations.
All because of the mystery crossing me.
The interrogation.
May 1988
Party
And everyone
destroyed in the party
lying.
By axe blows.
Godless.
In a useless chatter.
June 1988
Sky, your big arch
and what of me?
June 1988
Because of the Undifferentiated
Of a coarse voice the earth
in cracks
with the fissure aloft
shouting
furiously
because of the detail
the edges
the mixtures.
Her angrily
because of the undifferentiated
the promiscuous junctures
June 1988
Nobody
Some flowers for the table
for the earth
the opaque sky
the music
Some petals, pollen, waters
for melancholy
A desert, in back
silence, gravity
and nobody, nobody
June 1988
Hanni Ossott, Cielo, tu arco grande (Caracas: Tierra de Gracia Editores, 1989).
11.06.2005
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).
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).
10.03.2005
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).
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).
9.02.2005
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).
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).
8.01.2005
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).
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).
7.01.2005
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).
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).
6.08.2005
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).
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).
5.11.2005
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).
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).
4.06.2005
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).
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).
3.01.2005
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).
"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).
2.07.2005
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).
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).
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