Itinerary of Forgetting

Itinerario del olvido

NELSON SIMÓN

English
Español

Translated by LAWRENCE SCHIMEL

This is the last day which, resigned, I bury
in the sterile ground of an island
to which I am forever tied.
Tomorrow I must leave. My entire life
will remain like a bundle tossed to the waves of the journey;
few will come to say farewell when I begin
my itinerary toward oblivion; but today,
I want dawn to find us naked
(as if, along with our clothes, we might strip ourselves
of everything that’s been lived);
I want to feel once more accompanied
by your hands and the roosters’
lustful crowing; for our eyes to store,
like in old portraits, this moment
when my body is a brief thread of water
flowing until its course ends beneath the bridge of your legs.

…………Today,
I want to embrace you, to immerse myself in you like the cabin boy
clinging to the mast of his ship and for my lips
(bitter clam) to rest and still their trembling
upon the quicksand of your own.

***

Six.

I had nothing, just promises and a lover,
just the body of a man to say (in the summer
of reddish afternoons) “when I stretch above him
I feel I could touch the fleeting borders of happiness.”

I had no house, no sky, no freedom,
no other dove upon my fevered brow
than his dark kiss, no other root than his sex
sinking into my flesh, fixing me to the earth,
…………nourishing me.

I had nothing more than his words, musical words
that he left in his passing and which I harvested
…………like wild strawberries,
stains, howls I kept upon white pages
to mark my course toward false glory.

I had nothing, not even the certainty of being alive.
If I had some life, I lived it in the petit morts
…………he gave me.

These poems belong to the title Itinerario de olvido . Skull and Wind Press LLC (March 7, 2020)