Tigers as Horses / Each day, Darío

In the chimera of your hands
a childhood ghost came to me:
I am the judge of our actions.
Now hardly
will I be able to change them.

DRUNK

I used to wander around closed bars asking for silence
while the streets collected droplets of his violated blood.
At night when the circle grows, sometimes you would come
lost in your vices, pounded by images, floating in a corner,
no longer knowing that time doesn’t judge presence,
that the laws you hate are fear and violence.
If I see you, I hope
our exile doesn’t swallow up any prisoner it finds.
Do you know what? I gather the bag up around my words.
I know we are flesh of war.
–That we won’t die from waiting.

ADDICT MONOLOGUE I

I don’t know exactly where I am right now,
with my bones and these silent words around me.
I hate the voice that rings out so loud
as you search for details about my death.
All I have for you are primal gestures.
Ripped into pieces, I’ve already used what others I had.
One day I felt lust and that I fulfilled,
I threw my values down to play on the wheel of fortune.
If what’s left for me now are needs,
what do your words mean? You’re talking about somebody else.

ADDICT MONOLOGUE II

I don’t have any desires.
All for nothing and quickly.
For a pack of cigarettes and a friendly word
I’ll change.
The rest of my life.
All for nothing and quickly
all I have left.
I know I have no desires.
I relish the sweat,
the shyness with which you look at
my eyes lost beneath my fallen browns.
All
for nothing.
All I have left.
That theory doesn’t save you
from incompetence.
For a packet of cigarettes…
the sea water as it drowns me
feels like arms of roads that cross cities.
Desireless.
I leave dressed and tired
from swimming breaststroke
and I let myself sink.
In the depths of the sea there was a world of sand and creatures you will never know.

ADDICT MONOLOGUE III

I can’t talk anymore.
After cutting out the verbs, I was left without a tongue
of my own.
Our vastness ends at one centimetre all around.
Don’t talk to me,
On purpose I left the code hanging
in the entryway stairwell.
I cut off, like someone disinterested, the limits.
I almost get lost amongst the passers-by.
So, I cut off the limits.
Now I find my language leans into my entrails.
And to throw it back out again, I lost all of my interests.
What does it matter that you understand me?






Nothing leaves us more lost
than the shadow of our own body –scandalized by dawn –
ready to pour all possibilities into the cup of luck.
But nothing, maybe not even our own hands,
can drown the inevitable in glasses of history.
Here we remain,
isolated from ourselves, and here we stand like down-and-out men or broken toys.

PASSERBY

What do you hear when you walk
so slowly as you wander randomly at night?
Sometimes on caiman-like walks I resolve
doubts,
dream up equations – from nightmares or
from laughter.
Inside me I carry landscapes: doorways wait for taxis
in the terrible rush to escape
and along this side of the city traverse heads inflated
by drowsiness.
Do you know that?
You smoke.
You must have turned up the volume, I think.
Imperfections,
in your eyes, are only images of pleasure
misled, you say.

INDECISION

In you’d come, rage in hand,
to make claims about the state of things.
(Whoever’s with you suffers that)
You place
stone upon stone and upon that stone
a beloved name:
Whoever’s with you suffers that,
and that’s how
your idea of madness
slowly
comes crumbling down.





The slow cadavers of my silence
meditate
between the destruction and agony of battles.
On possession.
Bones, skulls and enormous sternums.
In me,
memories of my adolescence when I went on the search for warm mushrooms.
Successfully
marking territories of beautiful archipelagos
… the Bodies
Each one had its own idea. Dethroned gold
named in independent ideologies.
Still here,
how is it now here too.
On the edge
of the slow cadavers of my silence.







It’s not fair to shoot bullets through these times
in secret.
Nor that he expects to understand
the demand of certain unfinished motions.
I should want from you… a ritual!
(that I wouldn’t fulfil)
A lie!
(that I’d denounce)
That’s why I change the theory
and I prefer it
when your hands are warm,
your tongue
when it doesn’t know the languages spoken on the archipelago of my body,
your words when they grow like plants (in water and sun)
and they don’t need fertilisers for reason.
It’s not fair
to love a part of you and for you to open them all.







I know your memories of today are all bottles of beer strewn on the street.
Bottles of coca cola at your feet as you walk along.
Injured men sit,
windows looking out on a polluted sea.
Those gates take you into the house and through them you leave again.
I went into the bar and as you gazed up at the streetlamps,
your eyes filled with hundreds and hundreds of plastic beer bottles that flatten your eyelashes.
I turned around and decided
to drink my way around the city, through the night,
and you died while you slept.

Did you know

Did you know
that omens accumulate at night.
That suicides and martyrs
are fodder for deliriums.
That stumbling would be a beautiful ambition!
And you uncover, as you parse
and feel along the shine of the curtains,
azure paths of impassioned girls.
There you uncover the temptations of the river,
that one day would flow easily to its end
a few crashes then flooded scraped skin,
knowing
that stumbling would be a beautiful ambition!

For Luís Mariño

Testimony

Me, I wouldn’t even walk the paths of a poem…
You, you return to the spectacle of our days,
they scare you, the waiting’s diabolical,
the peace manic;
others’ eyes attentive, mistakes.
I stop for a while in bars:
the limping men there already know me.
That’s what happens a little while before
we run towards
our daily deaths.

Each day, Darío

Let’s go out, my love, on a little stroll through the city, along its smooth pavements. Let’s start a habit you’ll hold onto for life. Look at me, even my eyes be nesting dolls for the days you spend with me.


Somewhere in my belly there was a little foetus
we could see only on screens at the doctor’s.


For my closest ones,
you were a beautiful dream that measured a centimetre and would grow up to be like this or like that.
For me, Darío, sweetheart,
you were right there in me,
full and complete togetherness,
something so intimate melded into the everyday.


There’s no words I could possibly write, darling,
to convey the emotions of that moment,
can’t you see?
With you the long poem was already written,
you unearthed so many pronouns!
everything became a spiritual longing,
that resounded for so long against stone doors,
between places, people.

And I didn’t know,
I’d never know, that you carried the divisor of deaths.
For a little while I was a whole universe.


All babies are you, yet none are like you.
All children are you, yet none are like you.
All teenagers are you, yet none are like you.
All young men are you, yet none are like you.
All old men are you, yet none are like you.
All mothers are me and each one, like me, knows you are unique.

It’s not about possession.
I don’t own you, nor do I want to.
I care for you, love you and hold onto the hope of teaching you to own yourself.


Each day, Darío.
It’s an invasion I’m so happy for.
An invasion without occasion.
You invaded my life with nappies and bottles,
tiny clothes and colourful toys,
laughter, tears, love and more love.

Each day, Darío.
Your hand takes up a quarter of my giant one,
that’s why I almost hate so many words.
They’re all for you, I’m the verbose queen!
The empress of your guttural sounds from here on in!


I
You say ma-ma-ma
and you’ve already walked eight steps on your own
towards us. Can you see me?
I’m the mother who birthed you
and wants to do everything to help you grow.

II
What’s needed?
It’s always the same:
assume I’m mistaken and carry on learning.
Always looking at what I’m doing
and even more so at you.

You say ma-ma-ma
and I get ready to listen:
I don’t like what you’re doing,
I don’t want to, you’re getting this and that wrong,
you should go, you should take…

But you say ma-ma-ma
and you fill me with strength to combat the panic.


From a couple of metres away,
I watch as your eyes, hands and thoughts evolve.
I know you must learn,
that as you make mistakes you’ll be wiser.

From a distance I watch what you watch,
what you try, where you waver and the truths you learn.

The story unfolds again and again,
just like the catkins from the downy birches that will land
on the motorways tomorrow,
that’s you, my son, and you’ll always be
the best of the gods I admire.


I didn’t like teddy bears as a girl
and my parents say I didn’t play very much with dolls.
I don’t spend time cooking and in the chemistry of chimeras
I had fleeting moments of youthful delinquency.

A style of femininity somewhat at odds
with the time I was born.

And here
you are,
long imagined
and then so loved,
then present in those same rooms each day:
in being a woman, there’s a privilege that’s impossible
to pass on.


Your bright eyes bring plastic tortoises to life,
toy trucks too.
Your skinny legs take you up and down metres and metres of corridor.

And with that innocent heart and mind of yours, my love,
you direct
the orchestra of your life.


And it’s got to cost me
seeing you choose
what I wouldn’t.

And I should know
this is what
humans do.

If you’re happy,
I will never
be happier.

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Xela Arias was a poet, translator, writer and Galician teacher who advocated for the use of Galician throughout her life. As well as publishing four books of poetry, she was also a prolific translator, working on authors ranging from James Joyce to Roald Dahl and Angela Carter. Though her life was unexpectedly cut short at the age of 40, she had a significant impact on Galician poetry, writing in a way that was at once intimate and personal, transgressive and feminist in its outlook. After her death, her poetry was collected in a posthumous volume and in 2020 the Royal Galician Academy dedicated the Day of Galician Literature to her.