picking up where I left off

but not really

never a phrase has not meant anything at all quite like this one

but wasn't 2019 just last year?

didn't we just live a horrible 2020 and now we're back where we were before?

certainly not

and still we continue with the usual movements

coming and going and eating and living and

pretending

like the last eighteen hundred days

were just a bad dream

in between vigils

in the end

in the end
all we have left is poetry

Brecht

La cuerda cortada

La cuerda cortada puede volver a anudarse,
vuelve a aguantar, pero
está cortada.

Quizá volvamos a tropezar, pero allí
donde me abandonaste no
volverás a encontrarme.

--Bertolt Brecht

Granadilla, by Amy Lowell

s/t

Leaving the Table, by Leonard Cohen

lives

I could spend hours on end
working in the darkroom
developing negatives and
mostly
printing
enlarging my images

they had this quality that
made them foreign to me
once I graduated from the contact proof sheet
and enlarged them
as if giving birth to them
they started to have their own life
I had to take care of them until
they grew up and abandoned me
they started their flight while swimming in the rinse after the fixer
and kept on flying while drying
stuck to the grey tiles

my darkroom days are over now
I'm a translator
a passionate, articulate, all-over-the-place-masters-degree-in-hand translator
and I can sit down for the longest time
transposing images of images into other images
of other languages

my translations don't abandon me though
they live in me
through me
within every atom in my being
like the heaviest burden
they cumulate
and they could really climb the tallest ladder, the motherfuckers
but they don't, of course they don't

I miss the lightness of getting rid of things through photography

translation
as its antipodean nemesis
stays and buries me deep into the ground

and yet another one for you

a poem that I wrote yesterday night
but that will never see the light here

and then I discover that
someone had written this other poem
with so much more
poetry and musicality

and with the same love nonetheless

published in 1920
many
so many years ago

a poet who lived and died
before I was even born
before I was even the remotest
idea
in any of my grandparents' dreams

this is what I'm sharing
until you ask me otherwise

Altitude Lola Ridge

I wonder how it would be here with you, where the wind that has shaken off its dust in low valleys touches one cleanly, as with a new-washed hand, and pain is as the remote hunger of droning things, and anger but a little silence sinking into the great silence.

de realidades y realidades

cartas-jeroglíficos de amor
recuerdos-imágenes de anteanoche y tantas otras noches
canciones-almas que nunca oí pero adivino

¡no me digan que no puedo sentir!
¡no me digan que esto que siento no es real-no existe!

y sin embargo
extraño la tercera dimensión
y el roce que nunca tuve
contra una piel tu piel
olores que inventa mi mente tu olor
un sonido al oído tu voz
(que sólo me llega modulada a través de tecnologías
fuera de mi control)

fuera de mi control
también
saber
cuándo este sueño por fin dejará de ser un sueño

y en donde te estoy esperando

es ese sitio indefinido
inconcebible
fuera de toda realidad

no hay coordenadas
no hay
ni un acá ni un allá ni ninguna posibilidad de que sea
cierto

y ahí estoy
yo ahora
y ahí estás vos

y ni estoy en el norte
ni vos tampoco estás en el Sur
estoy estás ahí
estamos
en ese lugar imposible

algunos lo confunden con la Luna
pero en realidad queda todavía más lejos
y ni siquiera se pueden apoyar los pies
porque nadie
termina nunca de aterrizar

es como un sueño
malparido
bienhadado

es ese perfecto lugar en donde nos abrazamos sin tocarnos
cada vez que se juntan
descaradas
nuestras palabras

poema número uno

juntémonos, amor

juntémonos jurando-

nos amor eterno

con estas dulces cajitas siliconadas

a las que llamamos inteligentes

te digo me decís

te digo más

te digo todo lo que quiero oír de vos

y vos

me llenás de tu sexo con tus letras

redondas y perfectas

nos amamos, sí

¿y cómo vamos a hacer para que

esto

no se transforme en

nuestros anteriores fracasos?

¿cómo hacer para que

esto

sea

diferente?

dame

las buenas noches

una vez más, amor

decime

una vez más

decime

que me querés que soy que yo que vos que todo

que esto

es diferente y que
todas las canciones te recuerdan a mí

here is my castaway bottle

when I fall I fall
deeplymadlycompletely
and then some more
I fall like Alice down
into the rabbit's hole of
not knowing if the other one is feeling the same way I do

and it is my leap of faith

I let myself fall
I enjoy the adrenaline of the plunge
plummeting down into the void

I pass along the many times
that this has happened to me before
thinking
this time it's different this time it's
real
this
is
it

knowing and not knowing
the chain of events that will follow
suit: the happiness the denial the unhappiness

coming home from a non important place

I never knew that darkness
could be so light and full of desire
leaving in the middle of the night driving in a state of a just-sobered up drunk
who is slapped on the face by fear

dark streets only illuminated by the constant smog
the loneliness
sorrowed and beautiful landscape of
nothing

I search for something dark
something to fill that lust-like feeling of boredom
of self-built shame
and the emptiness of what I find
contents me
as if I didn't need anything else
but myself

Bueno, alguna publicación en inglés tenía que haber

(July, 2009)

So my two bookshelves collapsed, and in the middle of the chaos of rubble, torn books and shattered glass, I found my old magnetic poetry set.

Totally ignoring the task of cleaning up this ridiculous mess, I sit down with the board on my lap, looking at what survived:

look above
snow here
when
color melts our
dream will have to
take off too

if time could always be
a sky petal

they sizzle and shiver
as rain falls
like fire

all I ask from you is to
remember

cry between morning and night
did we keep a dance
which or how

my only wedding is
with nature

party
every day
month season

summer
springing

child
and green and
never
dark


I know there was more. All gone now. But this last one, the penmanship of which is, unmistakably, Vera's:

mom thinks a
happy love

pura primavera

me imagino, trato de imaginarme

Praga y Ema
Jitka soñando que
una cigüeña la depositaba en un campanario
así, envuelta para regalo, en esa manta
atada con un pañuelo de colores

o Julián pintándola
adentro de una cajita cuadrada
de color blanco

Ema mira y todo cobra sentido

ojos, pelo negro y en jopo, llanto
sueño, felicidad, más felicidad
más sueño
perdido pero bien sabemos que
vale tanto la pena

Wulf and Eadwacer

"Wulf and Eadwacer" (960CE to 990CE?)
by Anonymous

It is to my people as if someone gave them a gift.
They will thank him if he comes in force.
It is otherwise with us.

Wulf is on an island I am on another.
Fast is that island surrounded by fens.
There are fierce men on that island.
They will thank him if he comes in force.
It is otherwise with us.

Wulf’s long wanderings suffered with hope.
When it was rainy weather and I sat forlorn.
the bold man came and held me in his arms.
That was pleasant for me and also it was loathsome.
Wulf, my Wulf my ache for you
has made me sick your seldom visits
a mourning mind hunger for nothing.
Do you hear that, Eadwacer? The wolf has taken
our cowardly whelp to the woods.
A man can easily cut to pieces what never was joined:
our song together.


Acá se puede ver el original en inglés antiguo.

Sí, una maravilla, ya lo sé. Por eso lo puse acá.
De nada.

De China con amor

El lugar puede ser China, Argentina, o Estados Unidos (también conocido como "El País Sin Nombre Propio"). Hoy, o hace un milenio. En el campo, o en la ciudad.

La gente, sin embargo, es la misma. Vean (lean) si no.

PD: ¡Viva el mes nacional de la Poesía!
________________________________

"Spring at Wu-Ling"
by Li Ch'ing-chao (1084?–1151)
translated by Eugene Eoyang

The wind subsides—a fragrance
of petals freshly fallen;
it's late in the day—I'm too tired
to comb my hair.
Things remain but he is gone
and with him everything.
On the verge of words: tears flow.

I hear at Twin Creek spring it's still lovely;
how I long to float there on a small boat—
But I fear at Twin Creek my frail grasshopper boat

could not carry this load of grief.

Aguántenselán

Abril es el mes nacional de la poesía. Nacional en los EEUU, claro, pero aguántenselán, les mando otro que leí y me gustó. No es mío, por eso puede calificarse como de puta madre.
__________________________

Fragment

The glass does not break because it is glass,
Said the philosopher. The glass could stay
Unbroken forever, shoved back in a dark closet,
Slowly weeping itself, a colorless liquid.
The glass breaks because somebody drops it
From a height — a grip stunned open by bad news
Or laughter. A giddy sweep of grand gesture
Or fluttering nerves might knock it off the table —
Or perhaps wine emptied from it, into the blood,
Has numbed the fingers. It breaks because it falls
Into the arms of the earth — that grave attraction.
It breaks because it meets the floor's surface,
Which is solid and does not give. It breaks because
It is dropped, and falls hard, because it hits
Bottom, and because nobody catches it.


A. E. Stallings
Hapax
TriQuarterly Books

Shepard dixit

Aprovechando la lluvia, el frío y unos segundos que tengo antes de ir a buscar a las chicas, los dejo con esto. Que se trata de esas cosas que me hubiera gustado haberlas escrito yo, pero bueh.
La puta digo.



Red Wasatch Mountains glowing in the night
Sounds of Little League baseball under giant lights

Cheers echo off the mountain wall
We cross the creek on foot

Cottonwoods rattle softly overhead
We see the game from where we stand

Little boys racing for the ball
The creek is cold as ice

We find a hand-made bridge
Boards some kids have nailed together

On the other side it's sandy
Smooth stones

The Mountain has a hold on this town
You can feel it from the creek

7/31/80
Cedar City, Utah

Sam Shepard (Motel Chronicles)