Michael O’Loughlin 

Translator

Look for me, if you like, on some café terrace.
When I’m idling in a place like this
I’m a barfly without haste or schedule
oblivious to what I was a while ago.
Identity…
                                 And what if I keep changing
as the shadow of the tables and chairs does
with each step the light takes?
Come looking for me,
                                             or not, you don’t have to.
Without you life is neutral, lacking the edges
which mark the stages of pain
counted out in hours.
Don’t come, don’t bother me,
the café is the North of the sad.
I like to regard who I am from the outside.
Dangerous to incline towards the interior.

                                                                                  Portrait taken in 1918

I write for darkness alone.
For the fragile mirage
that with solemn fierceness challenges
the implacable succession of hours.
I write for myself alone, to assert myself
along the descent into life’s dark well
following the trace of ivy, that climbs
from the deep and solitary root,
and shines, content, on the stone walls
in spite of the moon’s icy clarity.

There’s a hell of silence and ice
that’s been living inside me for a long time now.
with no signs of a way out.
I want no mirrors depicting the fleeting strake of shadows.
Deprived of light I await dawn’s chiaroscuros.
Dark sister
mother
lead the way
voracious and kindly night.
Moss edging
make me a pillow.
Ancient root
welcome me in your embrace.
Earth that I am
portal of roots
open the entrance hall of eternity
the ample river of sorrow crosses.

Looking out of silence I learned from you
the miracle of geranium laughter,
the hidden enticement of ferns,
the joy of wild marigolds, and the sweet
and persistent blooming of the roses
you planted in our window box.

I celebrated from within, not inside
the house, but deeper inside.
The plants lived for your hands
that conveyed the instinct of survival
and growth in beauty, even though
it was for so humble a scene
as our slight and frail balcony.

I am grateful you taught me
what can’t be learned in books or school.
Now I have a garden I can’t inhabit,
and that’s how I know I’m a bad pupil.
On the other hand, though, I believe
in that persistent instinct of survival
and transmission that touched me
from the start. You will always live
on in a garden, inside the four of us,
and I may live on the gray pages of verse.

                                                         Nocturne near Athens

They spent many hours, long days
digging into the entrails of earth
searching for the evidence of death
rather than the origin of life.
Small shards, slight ancestral traces
of common forebearers revived in myths.
Burnt by the hot southern sun,
they have savored the taste of dust,
as bitter as the wind, as dry as clay.

In the evening they change skins
and leaving the home of gods and myths
they go back to their mortal measure.
Dressed in blue jeans
they walk through the peaceful night
and dance, holding each other, oblivious,
to the sound of nearby music,
from a walled garden full of myrtle in bloom,
with the passion that makes them mortals
again and rivets them to the remains of life.

A while before everything starts
I rise with an ancient and lethargic calm
to look at myself in the mirror and recompose
the image of who they believe I am
because they don’t know I only exist
in what I write
what I write,
what fills the notebooks of the cities
which happen to welcome me,
strangely distant from me,
a stranger who lives by sipping the inky wine
of what I write
an exchange with the font of so many dreams.

                              Never return to the places where you were once happy…
                                                                                                          (Quim Español)

I lived because I’d a heart of stone.
Battered by time, it recovered
laced with the passions it hoarded,
always invisible to the eyes of others.
Because it was not the power of men
but that of mind and heart
turned into knowledge and love in a single breath,
indissoluble like the blood which nourished it.
I live with the heart rooted in stone
in the shadow of the valley, at the edge of the trees
near the acanthus, waiting for who knows what:
a wingbear, a flaming sunset
or waking in a bed of violets.

Don’t change the position of objects and fruits,
nor the dusty blue of the wall marked by shadows.
Time will make them its own.
What was a neglected spot
now forms part of the décor.
What matter the whine of the wooden steps?
The table, the cloths, the blue jug with flowers:
at the hour of dawn everything is fine.
Watch out the apples don’t rot.
The scent is mixed with the swarm of the garden.
They have your odour.
                                   Cherish me.
Don’t break it. The still life
of love is fragile.

Here, her tin basin
is a White plastic vessel
I use for the same purpose.
Here, her chamber in contre-jour, half blue,
the other half divided by yellows and hot pinks,
has an aseptic chill coming off the white of the wall tiles
above a red 1950s floor.

After the bath, she has confronted the defiant, triumphant body
in an ecstasy of waiting.
Tongues of damp drip down my flanks and groin
to reach the towel crumpled at my feet.
Half the mirror shows her an abundant nude.
I recognise myself, looking at the new points of topography.
All is body,
matter repudiated by the sardonic grin of the flesh.
This line locates the limits of before and after
right in the middle of the route stamped by vessels of artifice
through which blood and water wash between two laundries.
Dividing line through a single domain.

He, outside the painting,
has traced in paint the line where light and dark meet
in her extremely accurate toilette.

You are not there.
You will not regard the nude cut in two
by the magneta guffaw of the flesh.

I am not she.
The distance between us is that of the gaze
from Pierre Bonnard to Lucien Freud.