Two Poems

1982

Is it me talking
in this year of 1919?
Vicente Huidobro, Altazor

Let’s split up the goods. I want the skinny cows
(I’ll make a canoe with their leather and bones).
To be full of eyes is not to see the future, it’s feeling the trees at night.
Safety in not knowing, wonder which leaps out like a cat on the highway,
mystery sliding away, all still here. Hope got stuck back in 1919.
Aren’t I hoping like everyone else when I dream of you alone in my canoe?
I know that travel is a form of waiting; I’ll find you in the
river, hand you an oar and adventure will find us together.
Oars and water carry me; when I run aground I amuse myself with traveler’s
tales in which monsters and princesses confront the voyager,
noise and mystery fills me more than hope: I plunge into her waters.
What’s hope but a savings account, a pre-paid grave,
an old woman in lace, abandoned at the altar?
Hope lost its youth in 1919.
Is it me talking in this year of 1982?
Paratroopers don’t exist yet, nor motors which light up the dawn,
nor airplanes like flags, nor futures: the future stretches out,
the canoe and that old river roar into the gorge;
beyond lies the sea. The waters plunge down beneath the earth.

ARCHIMIDES

After three years of siege the Romans took
Syracuse. Absorbed in the solution of one
of his geometrical problems, Archimedes
was slain.

Where the head fits the whole body will fit and we plunge
through the little door to sunny herbal terraces,
or like Alice we follow the white rabbit to another country.
Nobody knows what terrain the ostrich travels when the world stalks it,
sometimes we play at being marble statues, leaving our body as a sign,
tiny Archimedes who travel the sand, following our own tracings
unmindful of the invaders who have already taken the plaza.

Posted: April 8, 2012 at 9:39 pm