Texto. Extracto de libro

From Urania (ed. 2016)

In a chestnut wood. In the wood, a woman. The woman reads, thinks.
A book or illuminated codex.

In the codex, a woman. In her hand one end of the cord whose other end encircles the neck of Rosanna who ambles and grazes behind the woman.

In the codex, above the berms, the mountain looms as towering crags; between rock towers, strewn stones.

In the codex, oaks, blue sky through trees,
expanding between the bare oak branches.

Do you remember
when crows came to drink at the river?

The woman is seated. In the codex, landscape of looming crags, deep in it a man contemplates the sky, in the sky a crow “it was he who’d been nourished by crows bringing bread in their beaks, bread, through the clouds
to where he lived at the foot of that rugged abyss.”

It could well be that in such a landscape Raphael painted a Messiah as most perfect triangle: transfigured.

The woman reads, thinks. Craggy cliffs towering. Even at the brink
of the road, plunking onto the shoulder.
From the embankments/cutbanks
clouds.

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From Heloísa (Espiral Maior, 1994)

for Sabela R. Oxea

In my dream I’m no April lass
no princess of Aquitaine
skating eludes me
I have no laud
Saint Gudula I am not
nor Ilduara Eriz.

No one’s in the forest stalking boar
no one will adorn their brow with pheasant emerald.

In my writing I’m astronaut on a summer night
(astronaut in simulated orbit)
my ribs sprout algae
my spacesuit a thousand sparrows.

I’m no bird
nor wake that crosses the river.

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From Heloísa (1994)

A dream
industrial landscape
satyrs
shepherdesses.
Heroism and luxury
Marcelle

The fruit that sustains Persephone is hell

so the imagining of hell consists in perceiving it five times over
through all five senses

see the glowing bodies
five times
hear the shrieks of aching souls
five times
smell the sewer of the abyss
five times
taste the bitterness of tears
five times

Myth changes
produces discards

but don’t start thinking you’re a god
the cardial of Byron
the poems of Ritsos

that jolt awake when I knew that darkness is all that is possible.

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From Fascinio (2010)

for Estrela Piñeiro

… THE WOMEN continue their assigned work in the cannery, from keeping the woodpile stacked to lugging pine logs from the mountain, contributing their efforts to the tasks of the dragnet sardine fishers, boys mostly barefoot, with heads shaved and overall showing signs of malnutrition...

...with the stores given up for lost, the search for the frigate began so as load up again on weapons and ammunition...

In the green mouth
kaolin, wolfram, the frigate Lively, the Enmerillon people, she-the-revealer, God,
Sputnik

the wind-bent Australian tree¹ that drives me crazy on the brink of dream
the thirty anorexic Medieval women saints
the succession of mother-women
matricide

gold flashing on the index finger, on the wrist

seventy sunsets, 5000 hill-forts, 300 Neolithic grave-mounds caress your body

you turn around, head back along the path

all the thatched roofs
shadoof, phosphorescence, seagleam

celestial are the waters

roil coil mesh harvest sea-cave GALLAECIA
fecundity of stars!
sandbar

the descent into hell

Faber-Castell

Irmgard Möller

Limassol

Antioch.

From Nínive (1996)

OUTSIDE

I had to learn American just like a foreign language

but she’d spent her childhood in Galicia speaking Spanish

a combo of correct office Spanish
mixed with the impossible Spanish of ladies

native language / dismemory
vernacular / all was vernacular

the sensation an entire people can feel
on finding themselves shut outside
of their shared native tongue

how could she have anything poetic in her?
she’d been born here
had abandoned her language
complained
—It’s a nice place to be, for a month, in summer
in winter here there’s nothing
you go riding a bicycle here and you’re a slut
you go out wearing a tank top here and you’re a slut

they extirpated Galician from us
even if life had to be plucked out in the process

our tongue the stigma that still denounces us, even now.

Corrupt use of language

your reliable protection against words
—who do you think you are?, a whiff from my navel?

how the language invariably defeats you

better to be a pariah

put something exactly where it belongs

put flowers in the vases
and the day that’s quickly fleeing...
time deferred
but no waters are impassable
and my senses never abandon me

to be superfluous means utterly not belonging to the world

to be outside the world

—is our identification with our language superfluous?

—if someone dares to tell “the truth” again

or

enough already of “truth” i’ve had it with truth

or

leave me in peace with your truth! I’m sick of all this truth

words like that or others just the same

the monstruous

how words go dark

Eden

Hotel Eden

Rosa Luxemburg
here the murderers are holding their banquet

Happiness

happiness for them

happiness for us

in unity

in uniformity

Happiness!!!

soon these unlucky peoples will lose their individuality

we being them

them being us

difference negates unity, hatred, happiness

madness negates peace

—what do you think you’ll find in the lake?

—not some poetic morsel from Heaney
“And find this pupil dreaming/ Of neolithic wheat”²
instead you’ll find the regiment from The Horse Soldiers
—get this woman out of here

these are the dialogues you learn
we just lap it up

—cut his boot off, Sam
—nobody’s cutting that boot off
—take a good stiff jolt
—those are $20 boots, trooper
—take A-troop, find a ford someway across that river, take a bugler with you
—Sir, thank you for the opportunity

the sentence
“I had to learn American”
is a phrase of Raymond Chandler’s
I took from the poem “Striking Resemblance”
by Tina Darragh

L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E

it describes how my parents were determined to educate us in Spanish

later everyone would forget the importance of language

hate’s more economical
and makes all the rest a blank slate
of thought

almost mute
almost still listening
to the call

it comes
just once
dressed in mourning and you move close to my tomb

silence splits
is reduced to its smallest parts
tiny bits
shrunken
between vowel and vowel
between vowel and consonant

open body of the language
its blank spaces
between word and word
between one line and another

but I never could figure out death

the coast was but endless rock cliffs swamped by the fury of the sea and
of the torrents that fall endlessly from a darkened
sky

waters scintillating with dorsal fins that teem amidst iridescent shoals of sharks
mutilated
dying
that’s how they saw the poem
prior to the industrial revolution

a manufacture

to write in a tongue denied us in childhood
to write in a tongue we listened to, stolen
—how many words did you hear in that tongue amidst the labyrinth they spoke or in its absence?
to write in a tongue you listened to not knowing it was your own
and that it was a different tongue from the one they claimed to be speaking
—what were they speaking, in what tongue really speaking, those who gave language to you in your cradle?

tongue of ruins
language extermination camp

linguistic middle class

between corrupt office Spanish and the dilettante Spanish of ladies

all of you: monsters!

erasing all tradition
all past

totalitarianism
unreason
madness

because in your fear there was a spot
like a pinhole of the tiniest bit of light
something prior to you all
prior to fear
we went into that light
we called it: REVOLUTION. NATIONAL LIBERATION
anguish
Homeland

in your fear
in what you were dreaming
prior to you all
prior to fear

thus you erased our very traces
you hid your face
identity
name

—I, who emerged from the flood. I remember you all
in your debility
the dark age
from which I escaped

I’ll remember you all with clemency
with that childhood freshness that dangles in the void

but no temple awaits you all
no “Penelope longing”³
nothing of Paestum

40 tongues in India
another 40 in Gabon

someone will always speak in that surfeit of languages

it has to be like that
it’s not up to me: lyric
I am that stubble
that promenade on top of Literature

because what I sought in childhood was not my reflection
but that alliance of you who survived the defeat
alliance at the centre of all our tragedy
all determination
all impotence
thus: Poetry

collapse
dismemory

to limit the drama
to recognize we’re offspring of morally inadequate parents
of their refusal to speak
of their perturbation
of their origin

and thus the mirror didn’t shatter
it was given to us broken from the start
and then shattered again in us
us: those who now must recover the sea

for all the bridges were destroyed

in vases
in elixirs
in dreams

in memory

history as recounted on the papyruses of Orpheus
the history of an impossible identity

a new Hades
auspicious

as if one day a god held a hand over our mouths

the clarity of that light
the writing.

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From Ponte das poldras (2nd éd. 2006)

In der Mandel—was steht in der Mandel?
Paul Celan

In the stone—what dwells in the stone?⁴
the lagoon
the lagoon permeates the stone
permeates, permeates

In the lagoon—what dwells there?
the tangled tress
the tress permeates there, tress tangle of reeds
permeates, permeates

Braided hair of the dolmen you will never be dust

And your eye—on what does your eye dwell?
your eye dwells on the stone
your eye infiltrates the waters.
It sustains the tress
and so permeates, permeates

Curled mane of the Language you will never be dust

Empty stone. Regal-grey.

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From Charenton (2004)

madam, is what you write representative?
—nothing represents, it produces
—it searches out meaning?
—nothing means, it functions

”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

—does it have to do with a metaphysical language?
—no, with a transcendental language
—ideological?
—no, material
—oedipal?
—no, schizophrenic
—imaginary?
—no, it has nothing to do with an imaginary idiom, it’s a non-figurative language —symbolic?
—no, real
—structural?
—no, machinic
—molar, gregarious?
—no, molecular, micropsychic and micrological
—expressive?
—productive

from Charenton
Shearsman Books, 2007

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From Hordas de escritura (2008)

Definition: poet equals non poet

1st Proposition: the true poet is the one whose muse has been integrally destroyed

Scholium: if whoever writes poetry is one whose muse was destroyed, it means that poet and non-poet never perfectly coincide, that it is not possible to integrally destroy the muse, a residue always remains. To be poet is to be that residue

(according to the geometric order)

(…) these waters coexist but are not identical, this indivisible intimacy

                                                           from Hordes of Writing
                                                           Shearsman Books, 2008

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From Carne de Leviatán (2013)

Eleusis

This
I
here
now
you
today
tomorrow
thus
the same day
forever

there’s nothing in the voice nothing

a tongue of fire that belongs to all and to each

but whoever says language equals voice
isn’t here
and returns

from Flesh of Leviathan
Omnidawn Press, 2016

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From Un libre favor (2020)

All you stones, bring me words
you are the far hinterlands of life

bring me the crumb of bread
the one the slug devours
and slops with mud from the roads

I hoped for nothing
believed in nothing

there was but the marvel of being comanche and at the same time
a tree

chestnut leaves encircling my brow
long tresses sewn with pine needles
the gown

just as the deer crosses the tracks
and from up close in the snow watches the train pass

so the voice
a horse
drinks from mirrors
and at its hooves it keeps
ready:
dance slippers                         

              from The Face of the Quartzes
Veliz Books, 2021