January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Andrew Slattery is a Communications graduate from The University of Newcastle. His poems have appeared in literary journals, newspapers, magazines throughout Australia, Europe, North America and Asia. His awards include the Henry Kendall Poetry Award, the Roland Robinson Literary Award, and the Val Vallis Poetry Award. He lives in Berlin.
Bathey Pelagium
Having slid up and below the surface;
urged itself to reach out
and take the moon whole in its eye,
the giant squid goes to depth –
eight arms and two tentacles
swirl the slick, torpedo body
on an imagined course to the ocean floor.
Twin front finlets rudder its frame,
lining through a school of oarfish.
The deeping waters start to cool
its runneled core. The floor
is not subject to the moon’s lug.
Tube worms and giant clams pulse,
but seem motionless in the mudded dark,
like organs under skin.
The sun is cold. There are no tides or years.
Giant squid rests its locomotor,
it’s lurked arms scan the boundary
of its mantle length for food.
The ocean floor is an undulant blank,
with an outline so faint
this whole thing could be myth.
Slow-swimming along conveyor tides,
it takes the ocean with it and keeps the earth
in its spinning. The giant squid
spools along canyons cut from the ice age –
movements aggrandised over time,
its organ pipes roll the sea bed,
with solitary rills, hear its weight
unlying the sea.
Kalle Metro Graveyard
Someone snuck in a cemetery. A break
in the line of sandstone apartments
like a tone blip in the city plan.
Surrounded on all three sides by the high-rise living –
the whole yard the size of a house, but thick
with blooming dark grass and the pale whites
of tree foliage. The centre gate is locked off
and wrangles of weed truss the tall iron fence.
Inside, the gravestones are edged black
with granite moss and hold a calm slant,
they line the ground, side by side, and some
so close they seem to be one split block.
Someone’s decision to bury the coffins
vertically. They said it would triple capacity;
that it was in keeping with the skyscraping
pitch of urban planning (“Drop ’em in
feet first… it’ll save space.”) Those too ‘proper’
to be cremated; too ‘proud’ to end up
on the outskirts in the communal graveyard.
Someone snuck in a cemetery, into the heart
of a city gridded with slender cross-streets
and municipal pressures. Bodies standing up
cool in their boxes. They must’ve slid them in
like a flower stem led down a tall jar. And tall
runs of whiteweed rise up the fence, through
the black, wrought gate latched to a sole iron
pin. The grass is strewn with wraps of strange flowers,
thrown over the fence by a visiting relative, or anyone
whose heart the city has warmed with stone.
The ground holds to the cold like the joining
of bone. At night, the apartment windows flick on
from all three sides, they throw down twisted squares
of light and bring the flora junk and top stones
out of mute dark. In summer, when the green rim
of a moon arcs the night, the tall weeds lean out
from the fence and dip their tips to the warm pavement.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Terry McArthur is a poet, songwriter, and playwright. Terry’s plays include Country Of Tears for The Midnight Sun Theatre and Dance Company which was performed at the inaugural Sydney Arts Festival and Naratic Visions which he co-directed with Chin Kham Yoke. He has written produced and directed multi-media performances including Seeking Knowledge and Casting The Oracle for the Australian Awards For University Teaching, and New Horizons for the opening of the Sydney SuperDome. As a lyricist Terry has co-written hit songs for John Farnham and James Blundell. As one half of the spoken word duo the cube he has released one album Permanent Scars and is now preparing to release Weapons Of Mass Sedition. Terry’s poetry has been published in, Upland (University Of New England Press), Holes In The Evening (Fat Possum Press edited by Michael Sharkey) and The Tin Wash Dish (ABC Books edited by John Tranter), Thylazine, Blue Pepper and Stylus. Terry’s latest collection of poems, Walking Skin is due for publication with Artesian in early 2008.
The Weather Eater’s Lament
Summer swift black sun burns
Dry rivers drink in dread the blaze
Days are dust settled thick and thin over
This track where light and language languish
The tongue no longer speaking
No more speaking
What’s done is done
Who can trace the ember from the fire
Smear ash across the face of our broken land
Or bear our lamentations beneath the dead drought years
Crossing and recrossing this once fertile valley
Hearing the song of the future blow in from the void
More Dirt Music
( for Tim Winton and Audrey Auld Mezera )
South of the dry lands
Between dirt and sea
Moving forward under brazen moon
Crossing the night tracks by foot
There is a moment when your eyes fall upon the gathering gates
A moment like no other
Those ancestral gates desolate and perpetual
Call in the forgotten songs
Cradling the words that sing of love and loss
Each song a code that blisters hearts
For who can bear such words of joy and sorrow
Who will carry such secrets in their marrow
Under the starlight of the gathering gates
There is no tomorrow
Only the songs under the shadow of blood rocks
Only the songs wedged in the red earth
Seeking out the singer
Seeking out the season
South of the dry lands
Between dirt and sea
No Worries
( for David Gulpilil)
He appeared
As if from nowhere sniffing the air
Looking out upon us who watched in the darkness
His darkness
And he spoke
As if his words had always been with us
We listened as if hearing for the first time
His darkness
One leg he said in whitefella world
One leg in his dreaming
His story
Fell upon us like the rain of rains
His coming into the camera lens like a luminous spirit
Bearing the lineage of his people
Holding the lightning in his eyes
We took him in and grappled him to ground
Fed fame and paid pittance
Let him drink and almost drown
Crowned him blackfella king
Deserted him for newer younger kings
Let him drift and ride the roar between twin worlds
He looked at us in our darkness
He smiled the smile of ages
He sang the song of his father
And disappeared
An invisible crocodile beneath the river’s banks
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Sue King-Smith is currently completing a PhD in Creative Arts at Deakin University. For three years, she was the co-editor of The Animist, an electronic arts ezine that has been archived by the National Library as part of the Pandora Project. In the past few years, she has had poems published in various journals including, Famous Reporter, The Paradise Anthology, Tarralla, Blue Giraffe, Woorilla, Pendulum, Oban ‘06 and Tamba and she has had essays published in JASAL and Linq. Her first collection of poetry, An Accumulation of Small Killings, will be published by MPU in early 2008.
Swimming the Unconscious
Before degrees of separation,
we swam the mire, quick-silver dark
with pores as porous
as water. Schools of fish caught us
in collective darting tides,
all of a mind, singular, no beyond
or outside and we rode the sliding
fractals of existence. Opening rice-paper
wings in unison, and rising
into flight we soared the curdling
updrafts and hung like tiny origami
marionettes, guiding strings
unseen. Migrating south we bounded
down a mob of kangaroos, eyes slight
for dangers, our sinewy legs
like springs. Life was a small
f lowered chaos and we duck-dived
kaleidoscopic centres.
Sometimes still, synchronicity swims
through ether, and you send
me an email, and I send you a book,
that cross unlikely paths in
cyberspace. And they speak the
same language, tell the same story,
and we laugh across the coincidence
that is not coincidence at all. (We shared
a primordial womb once.) And at night, still,
we dive head-first into waters embryonic
and old as time, swimming the
unconscious.
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Sherryl Clark has been writing and publishing poetry for over 20 years. She is a co-editor of Poetrix magazine, and teaches at Victoria University TAFE (Professional Writing & Editing). Her verse novel for upper primary readers, Farm Kid, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Children’s Writing.
Strategy
Down this back street
where foreigners are like
grains of rice on black cloth
you come to play
your secret game, undressing
with the slow malaise
of heat coating your skin,
ready to haggle with me
over who should spring the trap.
Rank clothes hang from windows
like human curtains,
your hands stroke his hair
you contain pain in your fingers,
strike like a cobra
prodded with a stick.
I see your face twist
in the mirror; from where I hide
it looks like a smile.
O
There are days when I don’t know
how to keep breathing this air;
there is too much of it, or
not enough, it’s too thick or
full of life, too empty of
anything I can use. I look
at clouds and wonder if
they are any better, being
full of water, or if I
should move to the desert,
to an altitude where the air
will whistle in and out of me
in thin, clean streams.
At night, I lie on my back
stare at the blank ceiling,
wait for air to be blameless,
to do its job of pressing
and sucking without my
interference. Or to just stop
demanding I deal with it.
I try as hard as I can
to resign, abstain, push it away,
but here it comes again,
shuddering, determined to
have its way with me
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Born in Newcastle in 1981, Sam Byfield is the author of From the Middle Kingdom (Pudding House Press). He has been published or is forthcoming in magazines including Heat and LiNQ (Australia), The National Poetry Review, The Cream City Review, Meridian, and Diner (North America), Nimesis (UK) and in many online magazines including The Pedestal Magazine, Foam-e, and Divan. He currently works for a public health/environment NGO in southwest China.
Sapphires
All afternoon panning for sapphires
in eucalypt shadows, hands dry
from rocks and river water,
frost-browned grass burnt back
by the optimistic site owner –
no snakes in that grass now.
Cockatoos make a sound like pure panic
and the dog races off after rabbits
and trouble, but not too much,
while the Milky Way comes out
like it only does in the country,
a massive tangle that seems to float
above the Earth. Way off, the cough
of kangaroos, big rough males
like the one my father told me of
from his childhood, that kept coming
and no amount of .22 slugs
could stop. Another image of him,
out on the Nullarbor hitchhiking dead –
west, nothing but sand and crows
for company, ending up in Esperance
and writing her, saying
it was the most beautiful place he’d seen.
He came back and proposed, straight away.
The Infinite Possibilities of Water
From here I can see the flood; the view is sublime.
Thirty year swell and the beach fills with container ship,
the Pasha Bulker like a boulder resting in a river bed.
God of such things, remember the anemone fossil
I discovered high in the mountains, a swirl waiting eons
to be found? And quickly lost, as such things are.
From here I can smell the salt of the rearranged beach,
and I can see the gulls, watching the ship and thinking
What a strange sight for a Sunday.
God of such things, remember the salt of her breasts
three days up the valley, how she felt as insects danced
like fireworks and the whole place shuddered?
Light funnels away from the ocean, turns red
then white; then, the quiet reconnaissance of the stars.
In the morning the faintest hint of smoke.
God of such things, have you ever noticed how sometimes
a woman smells like pine, or pine smells like a woman?
The streets fill quickly with flood, yet the warmth.
Cures in a Cold Place
Ten minutes off the plane, first snow of the season. It starts as tiny darts, wind-whisked and rapidly dissolving,
then the city fades to white. It seems timed for my arrival.
I left here four months ago, walked straight into trouble. I was hollow, as if some piece of me remained in the city,
some fundamental part. Months later I landed on my feet and the terrain began to look familiar, yet things were
still off kilter, my yin and yang somehow askew.
Spent three days in Beijing, a city that has never been good to me. I had to make things right, settle some scores.
Outside a rowdy nightclub a beggar told me of his sick eight- year-old daughter. They’d come to Beijing to see a
doctor from a city eight hours south, but now had no money to pay and no ticket home. He said a man should
never be this low, begging to save his daughter. Above us, the flicker of coal-stained lights.
Then today, Changchun, the lake, frozen over a month earlier than usual, foot-deep tracks like tears across the face
of an angel. Old people spoke soft, faces lined like willow trees; the young threw snowballs and flirted in that
Chinese way. Street sweepers cracked the ice from roads, danced as if the snow made them warm. I found a piece
of myself, put it in my pocket, whistled a tune.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
rob walker’s first full collection micromacro (Seaview Press) was delivered in 2006 after a twenty year gestation period. He’s published online, onpage, onradio and onCD. His latest chapbook is phobiaphobia – poems of fear and anxiety (Picaro Press). He moved to Himeji, Japan in January 2008.
cello
we drift
into sleep. my hand
an explorer wandering
your familiar valleys and
mountains playing the
xylophone of your
back. you are a cello
my hand languid
draped on
your
waist
for
an
8
bar
rest
Danny in Detention
Dad works at Hills but he
hasta go to the physio. for his
arm. whennie was a kid his bruvva useta twist is arma
round. me bruvva & me fight
all the time he’s 16 I’m 11 but
I can bash im up. he’s psycho
he calls me pissweak so I bash
im. dad belted me. I adta go to
bed ungry. me bruvva works at
kfc. dozen gimme nuffin. dad’s
got is own playstation in the lounge. dozen
lettuce uzit tho
The koan before the satori
(a long haiku / short tanka)
One hand is clapping in a forest,
unseen
The other crushed by a falling tree,
presumably
also unseen
Koan: a Zen teaching riddle
Satori: the spiritual goal of Zen Buddhism, roughly translating as individual Enlightenment, or a flash of sudden awareness
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Philip Hammial has had twenty collections of poetry published, two of which were shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize – Bread in 2001 and In the Year of Our Lord Slaughter’s Children in 2004. He is also a sculptor (33 solo exhibitions) and the director of The Australian Collection of Outsider Art.
Photograph 2006: Philip with his daughter Genevieve
Help
With a little help from a reader
we could crawl up onto the back
of a bicycle & blow. A horn? If
you like. Or a kiss? Maybe, but first
a question – what
is your aim? To kill
swimming? For a closure to swimming
a kiss won’t do. Better
a horn, its blue. With
a little help from a reader we could wear
the same face for both, for the grown men
asleep in a bucket, for the children snoring
in a thimble & not care which belt
we’ve been trained up to. With
a little help from a reader we could blend
the desire for hearing with the desire
for speaking & come out on top
with meat to burn, your choice
of kangaroo or stork. With
a little help from a reader we could home rule
the market women AND their troublemaking
husbands, them to houses confined until
some progress in basting & roasting. With
a little help from a reader we could insist
that our at-a-crossroads-style becomes us
& everyone after us, even the marchers
as to heaven. With
a little help from a reader we could be joined
by an Alice whose relationship to history
however tenuous is precisely the joinery
that our journey requires. With
a little help from a reader we could swallow
the first & the second & even the third word
& even, if some truth was thereby accomplished,
the whole of the poem.
Socks
So you really think we’ve established
a case for bliss? Stand up in court
for how long? – two minutes
if we’re lucky. Which reminds me: some joker
has taken all of the socks from my sock drawer
& filled it with forks with bent tines, all the better
to eat what with? Our last supper for two
was a disaster. Served by nuns
in a forest clearing, we were constantly distracted
by a klatch of monks who insisted that happy slaps
(as per those on London buses) could induce
instant liberation. A kind of pudding? Sue
those slap-happy bastards. For what? Their
bowls? Their beads? Count to ten
while I put this flesh to one side, for
later. Right now there’s work to do. We need
to set up for the next scene – a carriage
at rush hour, Aunt Jane getting on at Redfern
for her morning performance, will squat & pee
as we roll into Central. Watch out
for your shoes. Socks
still missing. Stand up in court
in piss-splashed shoes, no socks, our case
for bliss? Two minutes if we’re lucky.
A Ball
You saw it on NAGS, the scratch channel, how friends
in black can breed with friends in blue & at the end of nine
have a worthwhile product, a ball, say, that you can bounce
wherever you like. Why not
in a casbah? It’s speech as though by magic
translated into Arabic, you’ll break the spell
of Delmonico (the lion tamer ripped apart
by his seven lionesses). These urchins
will love you; they’ll let you live to tell the tale:
how camels, having negotiated the perils of the Pont
Neuf & the cobblestones of Rue Dauphine,
eventually arrived in Oran with three rimes
& a metaphor into which anything, even a recipe
for a homemade bomb, could be stuffed.
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Marcelle Freiman is a Sydney poet who migrated from South Africa to Australia via England in1981. She lectures in creative writing and post-colonial and diaspora literatures at Macquarie University. Her poetry has appeared in a range of literary journals and anthologies. Her first book Monkey’s Wedding (1995) was Highly Commended for the Marjorie Barnard prize.
Yellow
The journalist Nat Gould gazes into a doorway of a Sydney Opium Den 1896.
My pipe is honey, Englishman,
to you I am indolent, yellow
on a low bed in my house of pleasure,
head on a silk cushion, hip rounded.
I see you clearly through the smoke
sweet odour of my O P’Ien,
my slender pipe of bamboo like a flute.
Your slack mouth hangs with lust.
Is it my cheongsam body you desire
or the pagodas, ice and crocodiles,
the Herb of Joy brings,
the fine pitch of taste, the way
my smooth skin lives?
You at the door, half in half out,
– I am not a woman
but opium and sex. You would steal it
as your country did at Nanking,
pious in your avarice.
My life is nothing to you –
I am dragon-woman
exotic to you as baboons and monkeys.
This is no den, it is your own
dark cell. Your necktie
is choking you. I am bright as fire,
my hands are small.
Yes, drink from your hip-flask, Mister,
shake my gaze from your face
if you can.
Nat Gould, ‘Eaters of Raw Meat’ (1896), The Birth of Sydney, Ed. Tim Flannery, Melbourne, Text, 1999.
Clown
A smile, crazy with shame,
little lost diamond-eyes,
the clown mask pushed
its face against the glass
days of empty rooms
when we played a mad tune
flippy with pigtails and mama’s red lipstick
stolen for sheer revenge –
turned itself tight, yes,
little monster found its power
but got trapped in the smile
like a puppet, got locked
in the cold room,
wild at the boar-shaped world –
and elsewhere it knew was sun,
like the ball left in the corner,
yellow as light of windows.
Road
I like streets that go down – Grace Cossington-Smith 1971
It’s a road that ribbons down a hill
and up – a velocity, a force
more than a road –
the sky is wide and bright
and the speed of your eye
grabs the horizon –
wanting elsewhere, beyond –
fast as telegraphed voices in the wire,
fast as the line
of the eucalypt that bends its curve
on the surface of your eye
upwards from the purple gully.
How it fights with the walker, this road,
with the slow horse cart,
its line tense
with trees humming green,
edgy with the speed of sound,
the speed of your eye on the road.
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Mark Tredinnick is a poet, essayist and writing teacher; he lives in Burradoo, in the highlands southwest of Sydney in Australia’s southeast. His books include The Little Red Writing Book (published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2008 as The Cambridge Essential Writing Guide), The Land’s Wild Music and A Place on Earth. His landscape memoir, The Blue Plateau, and The Little Green Grammar Book will appear in 2008. Mark is also at work on a volume of poems and a book about the consolations of literature in a frantic age. Mark’s prizes include The Newcastle Poetry Prize, The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, The Calibre Essay Prize, The Wildcare Nature Writing Prize and shortlistings in major awards, including The ABR and Broadway Prizes. His writing (poems, essays and criticism) has appeared in many books and anthologies, in Best Australian Essays, and in Australian and overseas journals and newspapers including Island, isotope, Orion, Manoa, PAN, Southerly The Sydney Morning Herald. He has written regularly for The Bulletin.
In recent years, Mark has edited a number of collections of Australian writing, each published as a special issue of a literary journal: Where Waters Meet (Manoa18:2, with Larissa Behrendt and Barry Lopez), Watermarks (Southerly 64:2, with Nicolette Stasko), and Being True to the Earth (PAN 4, with Kate Rigby). He has taught landscape writing, creative non-fiction and poetry at centres in the USA and at The University of Sydney.
Photographer :Tony Sernack
Urban Eclogues
I
Adrift in the middle of my years, I sit in a corner and drink. I eavesdrop
a tableful of girls romancing their cell phones, workshopping
love’s abstract particulars.
Football plays on the big screen;
I listen like a thief in case the women know the score.
But I never could tell. At fulltime I walk home like a motherless child.
II
Witness is a solitary game. There isn’t a thing I have left to say
but back in my room I ring like a singing bowl,
empty and unable to stop.
You’re in nine kinds of pain, my friend; you know
the twenty-seven strains of despair. And your lovely hair has fallen.
The moon at my window is a rusted shot, caught in its corrupt trajectory down.
III
The world was always someone else’s oyster, a metaphor
I never could prise open.
All I’m good for tonight
is to let the night pass,
while beyond me the world peters and my friend fights beautifully
like a trout on God’s line. The usual idiots are still in power. But they’ll keep.
Two Hens
Make prayer at the concrete trough
beneath the dripping tap. Flush now with summer
the water poplars graze a slow benediction
over the birds, and a miser’s rain falls through the
morning.
From my desk I look out on this
epitome of good fortune and pray for more
rain. The weather has turned. It will do that
if you wait. The wind is in the south
and the leaves of the poplars shiver silver
as though something that was wounded is now healed.
These past days have tried and found me
wanting, and I have almost failed, but here
I am, still who I always was,
only more so. The days you love are not
the days that prove you. Winter is my weather;
I grow by waiting. And there is no end
of the dying one did not know
one had yet to do to one’s self.
But you’ve had days like these. I envy
the hens the steady circle of their days,
but this is not how mine go; I am strung from stars
that once were gods and can’t seem to forget.
Plenty
Dandelions break out like lies in the grass. There’s an election
in the wind and promises on the table beneath the poplars and even the weeds
look good in the spring. But not far west
crops fail in their red fields
and rivers wither into memory. The future fails and the economy blooms
its profuse abstractions. What will the children eat when the wheat no longer rises?
And You
One child learned to walk
the day another learned to drive
and in between sixteen years ran before they could crawl
me any closer to who I’m meant to be
by now. November’s fallen back into winter. All day long on the roof
the rain writes the only script there’ll ever be for any of this.
God delivers when you stop
praying. The music starts when you stop
playing so hard and listen.
Some good came along today when I was busy hoping
for nothing, sweeping the cowshed instead and putting things off.
Want only the rain to fall and your children to find out for themselves.
Oh, it’s way too late now
to hope to say anything new.
All the music and all the meaning there ever were
have been here all along, and you may catch some –
but you mustn’t try too hard – between your child’s first steps, between
downpours, between the sweeping judgments of the broom.
The way Nan walks the lane
morning and evening behind her dog,
each step sounding one year of the ninety
she has seen; the way the black ducks land like tardy extras
on the rainy grass at dusk – enactments that say something I’d like my life
to say. Something the weather says, my children say, and you.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mario Licón Cabrera (México, 1949) has lived in Sydney since 1992. His third collection of poetry, La Reverberación de la Ceniza was publshed by Mora & Cantúa Editores in 2005. He was invited to the Spring writers Festival (Sydney) in 1998 and to the Semana de la Poesía Barcelona, 1999, and to The National Poetry Week in 2006. He has translated the poetry of Dorothy Porter, Judith Beveridge, Peter Boyle, J.S. Harry, Robert Adamson, amongst other Australian poets, into Spanish.These poems are part of Yuxtas, a bilingual collection (Spanish/English), written with the assistance of a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts/Literature Board. Read Peter Boyle’s review of Juxtas in our Reviews and Essays section.
Photographer: David Cahill
Osario
Will these be the 206 aristocratic bones of my father?
R.H
I
Rodolfo Hinostrosa speaks of his father's bones and
I think about yours, padre,
and suddenly I wanted to see them.
Will they have survived this quarter of century
buried under those drastic,
so insolent climate changes?
The scholars in such matters say that one – or better said,
our bones – can survive thousands of years
buried in the Sahara sands.
But you are not directly buried in the sand.
I don't even know what kind of coffin
my brothers had elected for you.
In any case, I don't believe that you were buried
in a dark and fresh clay wombs' pot
as our ancestors used to do it.
II
Will they move. Will they change site –
skull, humeri and femurs? A shoulder blade
on a fibula or a tíbia?
Will they seek the trace of the once beloved bones,
the bones loved
beyond the skin?
Of what will they dream?
Which song they will remember? What name
will they want to name – the bones –, in their darkness?
Perhaps when it rains they are scattered?
III
Once, as a boy, I saw the relics of some coffins
and in them – remains of hair
and clothes stuck on some bones.
They had removed a cemetery to build a playground in its place.
We never played there:
It was so much its dryness that we all crossed in full silence.
IV
One night, a couple of years ago
I passed in front of your last shoe-repair shop,
that one near the now extinct creek of your Villa de Seris.
The doors were wide open.
A dark deep silence inside. And the ruins
of the old huge house of Los Gómez more dead than ever.
Now I think that the ideal place for your bones would be there
beside the ghost-creek, near the narrow bridge where all passers-by
greeted you with so much respect: Don Ventura.
Tonight
Tonight I will not read
any of my poems.
Tonight I want only to give thanks –
thanks to Poetry and to a bunch of poets.
To Poetry herself, for having given me
another voice,
another voice with which I can talk
to the trees and stones and birds.
I want to say thanks to the Aztec poet
Ayocuan Cuetzpatzin for his deep knowledge
of the human heart.
To Saint John of the Cross
for his advice on how to make love
to my soul.
And thanks to Dante Alligieri and Arthur Rimbaud
for having given me such good instruction
on how to commute through the Hades.
To poetry for giving me a pair of hands
with which I can greet the wind and touch
the faces of my beloved dead-ones.
To Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca
for the profound resonance of their cry and for
the great love the second one had for the first one.
To Vicente Huidobro and Nicanor Parra for
taking off the face of to-much-solemnity
that Pablo Neruda gave to poetry.
And because the first one showed me how
to fall from the bottom to the top.
Thanks to Jorge Luis Borges who in his noble blindness
thought that paradise was a library.
And thanks to Cesar Vallejo, for all
his sorrows, his solitude and his poet's bravery.
Esta Noche
Esta noche no leeré
ninguno de mis poemas.
Esta noche quiero solamente dar gracias –
gracias a la poesía y a una banda de poetas.
A la Poesía misma porque me a dado
otra voz,
otra voz con la que puedo hablar
con los árboles y las piedras y los pájaros.
Quiero dar gracias al poeta azteca
Ayocuan Cuetzpatzin-
por su vasto conocimento del corazón humano.
A San Juan de la Cruz
por sus consejos de como hacer el amor
con mi alma.
Y gracias a Dante Alligieri y Arthur Rimbaud
por darme tan buenas instruciones de como entrar y
salir de los infiernos.
A la poesía por darme unas manos
con la que puedo saludar al viento y tocar
el rostro de mis queridos muertos.
A Walt Whitman Y Federico García Lorca
por la profunda resonancia de sus cantos y por
lo tanto que el segundo amó al primero.
A Vicente Huidobro y Nicanor Parra por
haberle quitado el rostro tan solemne que Pablo
Neruda le dió a la poesía. Y por que el primero me
enseño a caer de abajo hacia arriba.
Gracias a Jorge Luis Borges porque en su noble ceguera
confundió el paraíso con una biblioteca.
Y gracias a Cesar Vallejo por toda su tristeza
todas sus soledades y toda su bravura de poeta.