This poetry makes way for the aquatic. The passage of time, nature, and everything takes place through a gaze that advances laterally, in flashes, in glances, in illuminations or intuitions that lead the reader to leave behind her prior conception of the world and open herself to textures, sensations, surfaces, depths, and ideas. And one must surrender, listen, feel differently, make way for other instruments of sensitivity. That is what Coral’s poetry gives us: discoveries, revelations. Like in this poem:

Detrás de la cortina

Detrás de la cortina hay un mundo de calma,
detrás del verde espeso
el remanso,
la profunda quietud.
Es un reino intocado, su silencio.
Desde el espectro líquido
de otro mundo,
desde otra realidad de sonidos dispersos;
desde otro tiempo
enmarañable, me llaman.

[Behind the Curtain

Behind the curtain there’s a world of calm,
behind the thick green
safe haven,
deep stillness.
It is an untouched realm, its silence.
From the liquid spectrum
of another world,
from another reality of scattered sounds;
from another time
fit to be tangled, they call me.]

In this “tangle”, where we perceive not disorder but the slow succession of the landscape the poem develops, the lyrical voice always requests the reader’s tacit participation, the necessary counterpart that completes what is being said. This is a work that appeals to all the senses, that seeks to build bridges across spaces that might seem remote, very different from those we are accustomed to, but that, upon reflection, might well be just around the corner from everyday experience, in the abysses of sleep, in the hinges between one thing and the next, in the spaces that we think are empty but that are inhabited by near-invisible presences. But not invisible to the eyes of this poet, nor to the landscapes she offers us, presented in a tone somehow dampered, syncopated. So it goes in the following poem, which alludes to a mystery never deciphered, but only named, intuited in verse:

Esto que ves aquí no es

Esto que ves aquí no es.
Alguien te oculta una pieza.
Es el fragmento
que da el sentido. Es la palabra
que altera el orden
del furtivo universo. El eje
oculto
sobre el que gira. Este recuerdo
que articulas
no es. Falta el espacio
que ajusta
el caos.
Alguien jala los hilos. Alguien
te incita a actuar. Cambia los escenarios,
los reacomoda. Sustrae objetos.
Cruzas de nuevo
el laberinto a oscuras. El hilo
que en él te dan
no te ayuda a salir.

[What You See Here Is Not

What you see here is not.
Someone is hiding a piece from you.
That fragment
makes it make sense. It is the word
that alters the order
of the furtive universe. The hidden
axis
around which it turns. This memory
you construct
is not. It lacks the space
that fits
chaos.
Someone’s pulling the strings. Someone
stirs you to act. The settings change,
they readjust them. Take objects away.
Again, you walk
the labyrinth in the dark. The thread
they give you in it
does not help you out.]

The poems come forward through mystery, beauty, inquiry into the world and a profound perspective on nature (but also the twists and turns of memory and thought), sometimes leaving us bewildered, as in the previous case, which gives the impression of the perfectly assembled mise-en-scène of a nightmare, somewhere between fiction and reality. Disconcerting images, as if the products of a dream, are opened and unfurled in the verses like a flower of strange petals, falling one by one with a magnetic rhythm from which we cannot escape. 

It is not easy to outline a general idea of Coral Bracho’s oeuvre. It has changed over the years, taking on new tones, forms, nuances, and themes. Within it, we can find poems of many lengths, composed of many movements of diverse, fluctuating verbal music, where sound and sense become absolutely unified. What amazes me and what I admire the most about her is her aquatic tone, the way it flows and slips through her readers’ minds and senses, with verses that stack and intertwine, that compliment each other, that recreate each other, regardless of the theme or themes the poems address. There is a pleasure in and for language, an undeniable rhythm, a perpetual risk, a walking-on-the-edge-of-the-abyss, but also an explosion of sensations, not only visual but also tactile and olfactory. As David Huerta writes in the preface to an anthology of her work, “Hers is a poetry for the senses and for the intellect.” To conclude, here are two short poems, each from a different book; a window through which the reader might dare to make her own discoveries of all that which awaits her in this body of work, such that, within it, she might find her own space, her own garden of words.

Como un acuario

La luz de la tarde escoge algunas plantas
y en algunas de sus hojas penetra.

Como un acuario encendido por sus peces;
como un fluir
de la noche
entre rastros de estrellas,
transcurre
en su quietud
la maleza.

[Like a Fish Tank

The evening light chooses some plants
and permeates some of their leaves.

Like a fish tank lit up by its fish;
like night
flowing
between the tracks of stars,
in stillness
pass
the weeds.]

Lluvia de oro sobre el estero

Las semillas del sol nos guían
sobre el oscuro cristal del agua.
Abajo, entre las raíces,
como una llama incipiente
y silenciosa, vibra
la selva. 

[Gold Rain on the Estuary

The sun’s seeds guide us
over the dark glass of water.
Underneath, among the roots,
like an emerging, silent
flame, vibrates
the forest.]

Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon

Photo: Mexican poet Coral Bracho, by Isabella de Maddalena / Agence Opale / Alamy Stock Photo.

 To Jan Hendrix

What is a leaf?
What is a forest?
There is a whole forest
inside a leaf

Between the ribbing
there is light breaching
right left
infinite meanders
laborious millimeters
morning arises
the afternoon draws itself
in its delicate hinges
in its green arteries

Is it a leaf?
Nothing more?
Where does it begin, in the branch
pinned to the tree
ribboned on the trunk
linked to the earth
its roots tightened in the dark?

Or does it begin
millions of years ago,
the same concentric, circular leaf,
that all of us are, the ribbing,
the green breathing at us,
the earth that we are
we were and we will be?

Shadow Line

I want to be alone
while the deepness and the silence last.
Álvaro de Campos

Because I don’t want to be no one
somehow I’m everyone.

My figure dilutes
in the fuzzy edges
of a city that goes on
like rolling hills.

Perhaps I was much more than I thought
and much less than I felt;
never more inappropriate,
now I am a bonfire of words
where fiction and truth are already the same,
and my shadow line
spills out
in each verse’s light.

Sky Villages

“As above is below”:
so I looked one night,
upon the open field,
upon the mountains,
far away
from the cities that never are
completely dark,
the lights of a village
like stars
in the middle of the earth:
a sky leveled to the ground.

The stars up high
became villages of infinite light,
so far away from my hands
like the streets silhouetted
in the distance,
but the two of them the same:
the starry streets
a mirror of the terrestrial ones,
the two of them glowing,
together,
each night.

The Last Sunday

To Toni Deltoro,
who died on Sunday.

Some Sundays
the thought sleeps
like the leaves on the limbs
of winter.

Minutes look like
telegrams that someone dictates
in a time
where telegrams don’t even exist.

Perhaps all of the Sundays
come from childhood.

Each day brings us closer
to the Sunday
that will arrive wrapped
in cotton, anesthesia
and children’s playgrounds
where we will dance
our last round.

                                                         Translated by Arthur Gatti and Roberto Mendoza Ayala

Poems from Moonstruck/Lunática (New York: Darklight Publishing, 2023)

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Photo: Hannah Domsic, Unsplash.

After studying poetics with poets Milton Kessler and Stephen Stepanchev, and carrying on correspondence with Robert Bly, Arthur Gatti graduated Queens College with a  minor in poetry and a few honors, notably the 1965 CUNY-wide Dwight Durling Award for a manuscript of poetry. He was a co-founder of Queens College SDS, collaborator with the late Mario Savio of Free Speech Movement fame, and  co-community-organizer in Newark, New Jersey, with the recently deceased Tom Hayden, of Chicago Eight fame. Political involvements eventually led him to journalism. He published  hundreds of articles and columns and two books, wrote staged downtown comedy shows and sold a screenplay to the Hollywood powerhouse, New Line Cinema. He’s won various writing awards and has been published in The New Mexico Quarterly, America Sings, The East Village Other, PiF, The New York Hangover, And Then, Image9, Allegro, Riverside Library Poets Anthologies, 2015 and 2016, Jefferson Market Library Poets Anthology 2017, The New York Times “Metropolitan Diary”, and the international anthology From Neza York to New York. In 2015, he published a book of poems he wrote about what he sees as the sister nation of the United States, called Mexico—Dust in My Blood. Songs of Mute Eagles / Canto de águilas mudas (New York, 2017), which brings together his poetic work from recent decades, is his second book of poetry. Since 2016, he has translated more than twenty-five poetry titles for Darklight Publishing.

Roberto Mendoza Ayala was born in Mexico in 1958 and has lived in New York City since 2012. In 1994, as a member of the Nautilium literary group, he obtained the FONCA Grant for creative writing. He has published the following books of poetry: Las otras estaciones (1994), Negraluz (2004), and Ultrasonidos (2012). He has also published one book of short stories: Cerquita de Dios (2006). His work has been published in Mexican and international outlets. He regularly attends poetry workshops in New York City, including The Poetry Table, Riverside Library, and Jefferson Market Library groups, writing poetry both in English and Spanish.  In 2015, he coordinated and translated—with help from Rosalind Resnick, Arthur Gatti, Evie Ivy, and Gordon Gilbert and editorial support from Stephen Bluestone—the bilingual anthology De Neza York a Nueva York / From Neza York to New York, which brings together the work of twenty-five poets from Mexico City and New York City. The book was presented in Mexico City in November 2015, with readings at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the Museo de la Ciudad de México.  Since 2016, he has directed New York-based press Darklight Publishing, LLC (www.darklight.nyc), which specializes in bilingual poetry books by contemporary U.S. and Latin American authors.