Ode to the Afterlife

-- after Federico Garcia Lorca

The spoons crouched on kitchen tables,
lying in wait to plug the noses
of parents orphaned, sequestered
in corners of dark sediment honeycomb.

Guards asleep at the gates.
Bricks and curbs shaking in sunlight.
Cars with no drivers, marooned in the street.
Wailing in the distance.
Blood dried to the sidewalk. The smell of it
in the hot sun.

To facilitate communication came thousands
of translators. Walkie talkies barked in their hands.
Their teeth glimmered sharply in the sunlight.

“Lie down. Lie down,” they said.
And we did.

Fingers of Light

The morning too has its end in itself where the clearing rises and shakes out the dew shakes off the night the stars fall down dusty and distant although they retain their light they aren’t heteronymous to each other anymore the beams of stars still bright when they are put into bags

Objects and people fill the rooms the rooms of our night as we sweep up our days and the separation of the rooms the walls become membranes thick viscous and sturdy walls with the plant cellulose that under the microscope are hard and discrete

Separation is necessary but connection survives if the kinship of languages is to be demonstrated by translations how else can this be done but by conveying the form and meaning of the original as accurately as possible[1] is the same the same in all ways to express a feeling or visions the sensory experiences of time

Kinship not involving likeness that the bowl and the pot are of the same ilk because they hold things because they are round but they serve different reasons for being for use as is mer to sea to poisson to crustaceans to cheval to equestrian to coeur to the body

Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manqué la suprême that the imperfection of language is due to their plural nature and the supreme lack that happens when we think without writing no hieroglyphics to guide any future generation

The memories of other writers their languages their dialects their hometown what they had for dinner the night they died or that morning as their various lives came to their inevitable halt that collective intelligence anger hurt remorse drunkenness disease seeps through their words and weighs the pages and weighs heavy on the hand of the translator when she takes up her pen to transmit another’s words through the years and through the sieve of her mind

Ride the language seek out the corners of meaning intimation nuance syntactic ordering that orders itself according to the logics of the time so that no one syntax or grammar is ever concrete but for the participants and how they wish to call down the words into their various powers to call them down like leaves felled from the trees command them into presence into being Fingers of light begin to push up on the night Infuse the air with the air of the past the whole of existence becomes a Babelian circle like Borges’ book where the past is the future and the future the past

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[1] From Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” trans. Harry Zohn.

Chant for the End of the World

Chant for the End of the World

If there is god, if and a mother; if there is future in place of the past; if there is science; if there are roads left; if there is silence, magic and glass; if there is sunrise, if it continues, if it is curling, light on the mast.

If there are circles, if they move inward; if there is any air left to breathe; if there is dust on the soles of the young ones; if there are purple spots on their knees; if we remember, if we’re forgotten; if nothing remains for us but the seas; if we lose aspect, if we regain it; if we can’t rise up from disease.

If we are lonely; if we exploded; if vermillion hangs from the trees; if there are slushes; if there are gunners; if there is nothing much left to see; if we are clouded, if we are shrouded; if we can’t seem to outlive the past; if we are merchants or huddled destroyers; if we come together at last.

If we can say them, words in the future; if we sustain their potential blast; if we perceive that they’re building their own worlds; if we plunge into ebullient gas; if there we find refuge, inside the verb world; if we conceive of non linear time; if we roll over; if we roll under; if we can ever hide in that line.

For if we still utter, utter words without knowing, meaning pervades the subsequent space; never a real world; never a false one; a world built on perception of senses and place; if we recant them, if we withdraw them, still our utterances remain in the fight; words are the portals, when we are muted, to transfer interior ghosts into light.