There is a romantic innocence in this longing, yes, but also
an experience of someone who has lost, and is unwilling to settle for anything,
anything but Panama, wherever it might be.
Ilya Kaminsky
The Onion Offering
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
…
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.
Carol Ann Duffy, “Valentine”
Don’t give me the rose
Don’t give me the marsh, the streets.
Don’t give me the chiming of the tree,
Don’t give me the water and its chest of crystals.
Don’t give the thorns of what is beautiful,
Give me the onion
One of those that grow in Coclé or in other lands
Where its skin is white,
Fair like the chest of a wolf cub
Russet like the plumage of a red turtle dove
Draped over the still leaf.
Don’t give it to me from the watery lip
or the petrified forest that you carry inside
Like an unruly glass of wine
The terrestrial and celestial gifts
That creation went on to bestow upon you
With the crumbled ears of wheat,
Better than the nocturnal crater
The pale cherry
The molten stag lifting its antlers
In the bedroom feasts
Fragrant like cinnamon wafting in the desert
Sex in the beak of the bird
Dripping liquid arousal
Or the greatness of the mysticism in the seed.
I prefer to flee from your kingdoms
And leave the table set,
The utensils, the cold food
the communion of your body upon peeling you
Upon removing the skin and becoming the wielder of
the knife
And discovering your flesh in curved pieces
That open slowly like a miracle
Or a pact between God and the lambs.
Don’t give me anything,
Just plant an onion here in my land
May the stalk grow until it reaches
The enormity of the sky and the trial of the confines.
I leave you a rose
I leave you the winds, the seas, the homes
All that is felt, heard, tasted, seen and smelled.
Don’t give me the gifts, don’t give me the flesh.
Don’t give me the seasons
don’t give me the coat, nor the umbrella
Grab all of the vegetables of the world for me
But don’t leave me orphaned
Without the onion.
The Burial Site of El Ciprián
In this burial site we all have an epitaph
A dark song that chases after us from the past to the present
Like a garland of poor vegetables
The dead that dwell in me at times, such a weight
I correct them in their posture, in their gestures, in their
habits
They run behind me like a child chasing after the bitter
cry of the water
They go sailing alongside my blood
As the winter escapes in its vessel.
Where did the clothing of our first grandparents go
And my grandmother’s crazy beggar costume
With its summer letters after passing through the scorched
Looms of the wind, so they say that madness enters
through the air,
Through the wind, where we must go with the first ring
of the bell
Native of this luck, of being orphaned in the light,
In the territoriality and in the dust?
Where is she and the cruel grandfather
Who dispersed his children throughout the land
(Vitervo, Bredio, Janeth)
Like the fugitive beads of a necklace
That we pull with the rage of time, with that shaking
Of the animals that return from the spasm
When the night is upon us
Like a giant amaranth or like an octopus
That has composed a score with the stony orgasm of its ink?
Oh, my first deceased people that the downpour of
winter
Brings me in disorderly images
Where they contemplate the bestiary of the muses
If I haven’t been able to contemplate the yeast of their bones
Where is her tomb, the long-standing grandmother
made of corn and clay
Marcaria Espinoza who left without a coffin
Only with the shroud of tears of her absent children
In her humility and in her madness?
We will abandon these bodies, we will inhabit these bubbles
That the winter spits out.
There will be tombs from the sky to the vessel,
We will stay in your house and we will all be so real and
unknown.
This is your burial site of El Ciprián, where we will all
have an epitaph.
Marcaria Espinoza
And in her womb we gather in a contained weeping
Eugenio Montejo
To Mom
Everyone placed in the same scene.
The grandchildren in the corners
And her children to the sides
(shrouded like a bride).
I am in the bottom of her chest
Emerging from her neck like a tumor
Or like a prismatic vein.
We poets are born from the strangest torrents.
They say that oblivion will pull the trigger.
We will all emerge from this new Lumix: the family that
we never were.
The one that broke like a mirror and scattered itself
Like a river of larvae, memory.
Here each one shows their best smile
And others their veiled happiness, hiding the most
notable decadence.
We are going to go missing one after another.
Here we pose with its only portrait, unbeknownst to us.
Who traced the steps of the crazy woman?
Who determined the births in the air
Where the atoms of her maternal madness clotted together?
Where did that perverse grandfather pull out
The weeping, the hunger and the opaque laughter of his
children?
She flits through the skies of Las Minas
Like a clay-colored thrush at rest,
Like a steam of crystal in the arc of sound.
In all the waters she seeks them without finding
All the theories that die in the eyes.
Where did she live? Where did she go? Where was she?
She walked with a stick and carried
The figures molded by dust,
She led with a clean gown and with long braids
Woven by the midrib of the night.
The smoke never entered her eyes
And one could hear her sing from far away.
Grandma: I will go on molding you with every step
throughout these lands
With a cord of fury
Where I have no nose or eyes or hands in the opacity of
stroking you
To be like the rice that grows like a hand in the mortar
that absorbs the screams
A tallow of the calves that tremble
A crouched-down dance in space until the cold is defeated.
If I were to picture you between the shadows
Carrying the shroud of dawn in the asylum
Tracing a fable by that guy Matías Hernández where I
hear you cry
Like a girl smothered by dolls
Where there is suffocation and moss, or deaf bells
choked by the silt.
By a dry wash basin that bursts in the puberty of the pit
They are inverse seasons that I find
In your whirlwind fervor.
The black nurse really frightens you.
I am not a rabbit. I don’t eat so many leaves.
I shouldn’t be here, I should be in a house of clay
With a hot meal and the infancy of my children,
Poor but radiant and biting the tubers of the land.
Look at me psychiatric patient
With a missing record.
Who can decipher or imagine the pain
That lies in the brain of the insane?
Here she was and she used to sit and cry for them in the
sickness and feverishness of the day.
She never imagined the beard of her children or the first
menstruations of my mother.
We want to imagine her as she was
Tall and beautiful like the sphynx
Or like a goddess of Olympus or a flower of the Holy
Spirit with a skirt.
She went sliding away like in an agrarian moan.
She ended up at El Ciprián and we don’t know
The secret of her tomb.
Let’s all pose. She is here.
Her womb is full, very full.
We have returned to her.
We have returned to her womb.
With a contained weeping.
There Is a Small Village Made With the Poems of Ledo Ivo
Ledo Ivo is an old man that lives in Brazil and he appears in
the anthologies with a crazy face.
Juan Carlos Mestre
The crabs now walk over Ledo Ivo
Over the houses and the dreams
Or the highlands in the land of Maceió,
He turned into the sea under the boats
And untied his words like seagulls on the dock
Whistling this time that funereal chord to
the flesh of Hermengarda
For this intoxication that passes through the pursed lips
of bats and the cigarette butts
In the darkest cave where the souls jingle like bear cubs
Where darkness is stained with the iridescence of your
constellations
Rebuking the resurrection of the rooster,
The stellar milk of the spurs
And the unredeemed feathering building up courage
between the yards and between the sea houses
Where the boys sit on the back of the snail
And the girls focus their beauty on the virtuous marks of
the shells.
This is your home where a boy called Ledo began to
write his poems in the sand
On the sugar cane petals and in the mills where the
people sweat
The immemorial juice of the cane
The equinoctial juice of the cane
The demented juice of the cane
The sexual juice of the cane
Next to the infinite aroma of cocoa, by the cocoa flowers,
by the cocoa seeds,
Where
This time you illuminate the stones, over the will of a
black woman dancing samba
She whistles and whistles the funereal waltz
To the flesh of Hermengarda
And it’s you, walking like a mulata along the wavering
napes of the crabs
Over an enraged fire of water, over the flustered piles of
wood
By the reigning foam,
Opening with your word like a bed of leaves,
Like a pillow of trees over those golden dreams
That go to the memory of the path and end up in the feet
Of the infants and they begin to run
And grate like bees or butterflies taking care of deep snow,
Of the invented snow and of the sun that milks the
miracles of the goats
Where there are witches and women explaining the
roundness of the earth
With rituals drawn on the monastic spheres of the coconut
And young women extracting shoals of fish from their
hearts
Now the crabs walk over Ledo Ivo in the land of Maceió.
There, in Brazil, is a village
Where he learned to write poetry
A little boy anthologized with a crazy face,
Separating the homelands from the languages,
Emigrant and immigrant of the Portuguese language
Turning it into soil,
Turning it into the juice of the cane,
Turning it into cocoa,
Turning it into a crab on the beaches of Maceió.
There, in Brazil, is a village made of the poems of
Ledo Ivo.
Dora Diamant
Only he who knows Dora knows what love is
Robert Klosptock
Everything had been postponed—since the flight and
that long pilgrimage—
Towards the prison next to her daughter in the Isle of
Man, for being a “foreign enemy”
And for making strange coalitions with the fire. She also
formed an alliance with the sea,
Once at a bathhouse she met a writer.
Franz Kafka had seen her through different eyes.
Her fear of tying her bathing suit again and again
—the beach—was full
Of locals and tourists and she remained in that search
For the legendary phrase of the last paragraphs
To finish his masterpiece,
Always somber
Always unsatisfied,
In front of his typewriter and before the inconclusive loves
That once populated the isles of God
In pages adrift.
Indeed, he found her in the “unworthy task” of scaling fish,
“Such delicate hands for such a cruel job”
And both laughed and set out to walk at dusk.
This Dora Diamant said that there was another father
Inside of Kafka’s father
Who hid behind his negotiator’s table
To listen to the prose of that son with little desire
An even then his critique
Made him breathe in deeply the vastness of the frozen
morning
And although he did not speak with his mother at all
He kept on waiting for the men of black
Perpetually rooted in the routine
Of the kitchen or the living room
Or in the flapping of the bats in the attic
There is no longer a job nor a boss
Only taking care of the cough and of the crises, of her,
the last love of Kafka
The actress from the stages of Moscow, in the theaters of
Germany;
Now in this winter, from the windy storm of anywhere.
To this tomb
In the United Synagogue Cemetery of Marlowe Road, in
East Ham,
When we took on the haze
“Only he who knows Dora knows what love is”
Wrote Robert Klopstock
When the fevers of England attack us
Smoking contraband cigarettes;
When nothing is exempt from seizing the days
When a candle takes control of the cathedrals
And everything becomes inflamed like in the memory of
the ravens.
Those chirps that belong to the neighborhood and the
beauty
Of retaining the word “distance” on a table cloth
Set for the afternoon offering, then ending
With the silence of the whistle and the money
Now that I am here corresponding with a rose
To the body, this last testimony that it is possible to love
Despite the negativity of the parents
Returning time and again to the cemetery of Prague
Where the Jews killed in the war rest,
From a ghostly exhaustion, after the battering of the
holocaust
Or of tired lungs from tuberculosis,
That cacophonic expectoration
That chases Dora Diamant,
Enjoying each day by his side more than his masterpiece
And ending in that puzzle of Kafka
When she saw him cough
For the last time.
Translated by Joanne Britland and Lina Rincón
