The Memory of Alcohol

Nothing.
Like a blue deer on the rocks, like dark fruit.
Within glowing tunnels that lead toward morning, or a ford.
Like a song for agile fingers.
Or lumber, loosening its scent, drifting.
In the pacific spider of tranquil days.
I think like the leaf beneath the cloud, which sea
will swallow me after I’m stripped?
Or like arrival to a private estate of scattered seeds,
being Very Strange with the good news, and delicate.
Peter, John, or every head of hair with lips of the forest nonetheless.
I suffer when you receive me with your eyes’ arched ivy.
When I find that neither ancient voice nor gaze can save me.
Humbled among glowing, fragrant heaps.
I don’t know myself on untouched beaches, thus the tear

Pablo Guevara that hit the earth and became this, a second and sole love.
Which climates will have felt the passing of my wounded silence?
Or when was everything kisses all around, and I merely watched?
(1930 – 2006) They’ll come, I’m sure of it, beds and pendulums,
to remind me that at one time (when it came to blows)
we knew to love each other without question.
You brought an axe to the song, but a pink bow
sanctified your lips.

34 Paul Revere’s Horse Pablo Guevara 35

 For Love
And now I can’t sleep right, the rain stumbles on glass bridges.
I am in love with you, the man who lives in a cork,
and in your darkness I am sowing seeds. I don’t have time for regret
What’s there to say if I am a girl who one night, when the moon died, I’ll walk through the years surviving
knew the City of Honey never existed. I should be the lips of a child anywhere
And nevertheless, I still believe they wash in the river with white stones. The sorcerer’s tower and the elder.
We’ll return like the ocean to its memories:
the golden storm, that keel of renewal… Imperfection you could not destroy me
We’ll be a constant death on the road, together. Not if all the plazas in the world were torn apart
As the heart is violet in the libertine
The dreams of the just are not for me.

The dark horizon has blinded happiness

I tremble in the wind all the while like fruit
Between adverse climates and granite skies
My eyes do not see freely but they see.

36 Paul Revere’s Horse Pablo Guevara 37

 In Times of War
The eye of hatred, vigilant. The eye of love, also vigilant.
for Tantangaga (The Rock Abyss) in San Pedro de Cajas
Thin atmospheres exist to the North, South, East, West,
cordilleras and cordilleras, mesas and mesas, forests and forests,
This I found on mountain roads: hills and hills, gorges and gorges, sierras
violence and sierras, houses and houses, deserts and deserts.

raising hands to wound Violence, violence, violence.

instead of forgiving –I neither wounded nor forgave,
I contemplate
what the poets call love and hate for humanity,
the greatest cold and the greatest pain, the fire that devours everything,
and the calculators –the 2/3 of humanity that procreates,
devoured by the clock,
mercilessly disdained:
Men, Earth, Water, Fire, Air
do not weigh more than wind on the scales –they are not Power
in themselves.

I return to the struggle with a language that the old cannot perceive,
that the young –with the voice in which I speak, will understand very little
but very well.
Evidently, we are advancing with difficulty,
SHOUTING
so we don’t lose the vanguards and rear guards,
mesas, forests, hills, gorges,
sierras, houses and houses and deserts.

38 Paul Revere’s Horse Pablo Guevara 39

 Peregrinations of the Hours
(Excerpts)
for Jorge Eduardo Eielson, Javier Sologuren, and Fernando de Szyszlo

III

This love that cuts like milk is of curtains

and gates closed on the rusty dawn,
blooms fragrantly at night, floats in leaf and fleece,
spies betrothal and death on its Episcopal sleigh.
It’s a harp whose music rocks the dark wheat.

A child wanders across the glass of sleep,

sedentary, drunk on his skates, in a hurry,
and maintains his posture on sonorous crutches, watching
the nobodies, the solitary men
who love the tarred voice of soldiers
or the stiff, green satin of their arms.
Sebastián Salazar Bondy (That detestable love
hides its lip and is a broken, illuminated bird)
(1924 – 1965)
Love in the familiar expression of the dog and the ant,
in the wonderful news of a coming birth,
love like a lantern of wine in my hallway,
like a hotel geranium, like a fine Sunday dinner.

40 Paul Revere’s Horse Sebastián Salazar Bondy 41

 IV
I never tell her that the boot of day bothers me,
with its rusty light and oily sole,
when it walks through trembling cotton fields of speech
and on the beams that shred the robes of winter.
I never even tell her though the fresh complexion
of tamarind is like the crystalline evening on the table,
when we drink to the deeply felt
memory of a corpse, in the grey wave of time
that cuts through the ancient palm of the archangel
who cares for the fig and the cherry tree.
She doesn’t know that nobody occupies the air of my desire,
that nobody has touched the dust in my eye sockets,
that nobody will see the worm seeking the salt of my bile.
To her, while she ignores the river bed of happiness,
I’m only a doorway of spilt blood.
42 Paul Revere’s Horse
VI
In all of which I speak, there is fear,
there is the silent skin of a cat on the ground,
there are small images and flies and knives
and the sweet grace of saliva.
Mother listens to arrive in her wicker coach,
with her cothurni to ambush the god of health,
and in the windows that open their bedroom’s
inner peace to the estuary, there is still
the magic amulet of hair,
the knot, the dead pin.
There is a vague fear as when something abruptly stops, or the curtains
dance alongside nearby spirits.
Sebastián Salazar Bondy 43
 VIII X

From womb to prison, it began with birth,

from prison I’ll go to the precious tomb,
where I’ll always be burning in the earth. I am sick and tired of exile, between the rotten
QUEVEDO gestures of my mother, between the quiet salt of the poem,
between the mire and the mountain range, they do not hear me
like someone walking without a path.
Death comes in dust, in the fat of the diver, Now you all can see the splinter I worry over,
with its noisy spree of pots and glasses, the miniscule friend you’ve made,
and speaks as if nothing were unknown, the demon from which so much sorrow is created.
and rusts against the wall with its old tires,
and drills through books, kisses the ears of the mollusk
and thrashes the seeds from my flowers.
Its thick blood, in liters, does not forget
the eyelid of the living nor the dark legume,
the wild blood-scream, the wild leg that follows
the rivers of the house and hides in the nettles
where the cricket shimmers with its freezing tears.

(Good luck saddens me:

beneath my blanket, the stupid heat of the dead.)

It’s her, the stripped virgin, the flame,

the one who gilded my sex of yellow cabbage,
she who astounds from afar with her voice of Esperanto,
cloaked in humility and pale lamplight:
she arrives, with a cold plate of false teeth,
with her hand of dust, like a wild turkey,
with her insanely beautiful rings of dust.

44 Paul Revere’s Horse Sebastián Salazar Bondy 45

 The Park to a Man Asleep

Brain of night, golden eye

Of the sleigh bell you chime on the pine, listen:
I am the one who cries and writes in the winter.

Doves and snow-covered steps sink into my memory,

And before this head of contemplative blood,
Stone houses open their ruffled feathers.
Though fallen, between begonias of ice, I swing
the axe of rain, and the bland fruit
and vigilant leaves freeze with each blow.
I love my skull like a solid
Balcony above the black chasm of the Lord.

I work with the stars at my side, oh night!

And on the table of earth, the burning
Jorge Eduardo Eielson Poem rolls between the dead and crowns them.
Anyhow, my shadow moves throughout such glory
(1924 – 2006) Of bone, wax and mull, majestically prostrating me,
On a beautiful lawn, squandered on the gods.

Thus I love my skull in its remains, like the world’s

Cold parks where eternity is the same
Man of marble who hides in a statue
Or sprawls out, dark and loveless, on the grass.

46 Paul Revere’s Horse Jorge Eduardo Eielson 47

 Via Veneto
I ask myself
honestly if
I have hands
if I really possess
a head and two feet
and not merely as gloves
and shoes and a hat
because I feel
so pure
much purer still
and much closer to death
when I remove the gloves
the hat and the shoes
as if I were removing my hands
my head and my feet
48 Paul Revere’s Horse
Variations on a Glass of Water
a glass of water in my hands
and you on my lips
my hands on a glass of water
and my lips on you
a glass of water on my lips
and you in my hand
my lips on my hands
and you in a glass of water
a glass of water in you
and my hands on my lips
my lips on a glass of water
and my hands on you
Jorge Eduardo Eielson 49
 Sculpture of Words for a Roman Plaza a space between the lips
a tear in the retina
Ce qui se montre est une vision de l’invisible. what kind of thing are you
ANAXAGORE DE CLAZOMENE
endless verse
fleeting alignment
you appear of vowels and consonants
and disappear what kind of thing are you
you are a man and woman mixed up
and are not the sun and moon in one instant?
and you are again
are still it never begins
black and white unceasingly never ends
and you only exist the luminous and the obscure
because I love you do not have a beard nor breasts
I love you it signifies all the same
I love you the horse of marcus aurelius
I love you contro il logorio della vita moderna
I love you cynar
I love you a beautiful thing is a jewel forever
sculpture of words between the eyes opening and closing
sculpture of words they appear and disappear
sculpture of words the ephebe of villa adriana
sculpture of words the headless of castel gandolfo
you appear the teeth of marilyn monroe
and dis appear
wasteland where they play
leaving behind a bright opening armless green children
between the a and the s repulsive creatures

50 Paul Revere’s Horse Jorge Eduardo Eielson 51

 who drag to death I love you
a blood soaked cloak I love you
a sparkling trinket I love you
that incinerates I love you
you appear and disappear sculpture of words
will I never see sculpture of words
never your thousand clear eyes sculpture of words
with my two black eyes never sculpture of words
your luminous body
in my dark arms? do you know perhaps that within my hands
the androgynous light beaming the letters of your name which contain
between the sage’s pleats the secrets of the stars
is perhaps are the same
your diamond sculpture miserable ball of paper
that calls us that I now toss in the trash?
that calls us
that calls us
from alpha centauri?
you appear
and disappear
you are and are not
but sound silence sound
sound renewed
sound once again
a celestial unnerving
black and white unceasingly
and you only exist
because I love you
I love you

52 Paul Revere’s Horse Jorge Eduardo Eielson 53