Martin Earl 

Translator

I only know how to respond to life with poems:

and the alternative is to live life

without paying attention to it,

without responding to it, pretending

to not give it the time of day,

slipping between its twists and turns

in order to not write.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned,

if I really had

something to say,

I certainly wouldn’t say it with poems.

I listen to the radio this morning

waiting for a signal.

I know very well that everything that should happen to me   

happened. I know very well that each day     

brings in a tide with the spume of hope

and that we only tell ourselves about the shipwreck

very late in our lives.

There will always be a sign in the night, a song, a light

of fireflies above the desert of crickets.

And may it now be the youngest who understand the signal

and carry it in the fury of their hearts.

4.

We pilgrims walk to you from every defeat,

spurious children of History, foundlings of every victory,

we come to you with muddied vision and bitter footfall            

and we are not pretty to contemplate: we walk over every misery

the world has trampled.

We are many centuries and much torment,

we come to you with open wounds,

and our hearts hardened. But we came.

That you receive us at all is astonishing,

that you await us is what we marvel at,

here we are.

Lady of the dark side of time,

Black Virgen of the great Pain,

no angel will be by your side when we arrive,   

not a single drop of water will bless us

and the music will keep its silence at your face’s edge

that smiles not.   

We pilgrims walk to you

and so it will be over all things

and all times.

Yesterday, a man from the cities

came to explain the value of life to me.

He told me that my survival was a privilege

and the comfort of the bankers was just.

He told me of a new society, fashioned out of cleverness and fresh water.

I let him speak.

He doesn’t know that he too ended up on the loser’s side. 

and until he figures that out, there’ll be more roses

and the sand will cover all the gardens.

A gesture which shows some love                             

or a confiding look from an old companion:     

not even these can now infect with insolent life

this desert of days that move behind the high windows

or through underground ways.

No one else will come out on the balcony to stubbornly sing   

what hurts in our voices and sleeps in our veins.

The bells continue to toll on dark and clear days

through the deserted streets or ones crossed only in fear, door to door,

life hiding from living.

Someone writes the night away, but knows he doesn’t write for himself

nor for readers he lost in other ages.  

May a face loom in the window, may a line be lost in the street,  

that our pride in living last beyond our lifetimes.

A power must shine with resplendence. How? With brio and delight. The good priest has one fixed body and another fluid and radiant one: with the first he practices the world of second things, with the second the world of first things.

Today’s chore: to excavate an Ethiopian church out of the rock.

at night when the moon settles on the shoulder

closer to melancholy

the cup is hardly visible on the windowsill

and there in the background on an abandoned writing table

the plague of my poetry spreads out

I’m the hurt slave who’s resting from the idiom

surrendering to the unapparent noise of the insects

hands hung over the void

watching over the immoderate earthly trauma

Out of the silence an anechoic loneliness emerges. You can hear the blood hitting the artery walls, the whistling in the nasal crannies, rustling of the respiratory foliage. Standing, eyes closed, fixed but still widening in the cosmic grid cell, a small bird crosses within us, like a spark, lightning, incision, blunt idea or discharge. On the eyelids’ underside, housed as well in the chochleae, a salvo of phosphenes and tinnitus bloom. While outside, gregarious, staring, what separates one from the others is always a small wall between backyards. Insurmountable.

the hot afternoon

and surrounded by distant ranges

of eagles circling and keeping watch over the gods

the address

on the terrace of the rawist restaurant

between sun and ruin

a lack of smoke and sizzle

I swallow thick fruit juices

worn out from the complicated spices of love

and fed up with India that I’d seen and not seen    

a crow

perches on a wall

so much quicker than the photograph I couldn’t get

it burnt – nevertheless – the negative

of memory which this poem develops and fixes

with the sweat of the journey

here it is – see it? – moldering

with misfortune

here I am

at an iron table worn out

by the unremitting appetite of the suspended prodigy         

with dark fingers touching the glass

the straw

in the face of misfortune there’s

nearly always a place of refuge

it’s enough to recognize it

mine wasn’t late arriving in the fragile

form of a beekeeper

who came down the hillside ragged and stained

laughing

he stopped at the tables put

the heavy pot he was shouldering on the floor

opened it and I swear

there was this light from a chest thrown open

stuffed with riches

into which he dipped a branch and made

the few who were there taste

the honeycomb

we tasted

I’ve been waiting years for another heart

to make it the only furniture

in this old wooden wallpapered cubicle

which we also call the chest

it’s a delayed transplant                                 

first a donor must die, which happens

to be me in this inner exile                

so distant so tautochronic

I wait and fit

into what exceeded the exotic contour and floats                 

today in melodrama

coexists with the end, season of everything                          

that ever lived

one day this old bag

tied tight by the ego’s twine will burst

I’ll return to the mineral condition   

I’ll be a small galaxy of ash                

and dust

my water and my thirst

separated

hunger and yearning

emptied

everything penetrating

the little lacquered box that holds

the pearls

and the planets

they’ll sell the junk

that the world brought to the door of my days                      

and I paid for with the affection of years

I’ll be in the photos                                       

I’ll move with the caricatural rigidity

of phantoms                          

they’ll assume that perhaps I see myself

in the goldfish that swims in the fish tank

of these vocables but the fish                                    

will have already been thrown into the river

at the new year festival