YELID Á

poem

“Yelidá”, drawing by Virgilio Méndez, third prize drawing in the E Annual Art Contest. León Jimenes, 1971, Santo Domingo, Rep. Sun.

Tomas Hernandez Franco

Taurus Books
www.LibrosTauro.com.ar

A BEFORE
Erick, the Norwegian boy who had
soul of fiord and heart of fog
He barely suspected in his long wandering of horizons
the boreal lineage of blood that sang paths in his temples

In the longest month of the year he was born

In the fishing hut of tar and nets almost splashed by the waves, he gave
birth between the miracle of the sea and the midnight sun of his
shipwrecked absent father.
swimmer already of deep algae and surprised sands
of scales and gills and fins

He was the fifth son for the sea born

and Erick grew up in his language of hook and current
rowing strength and foam simplicity
like all the beach boys
half Triton and half Angel

But Erick didn't know anything about that.

-wind pulse and bow stubbornness-
He learned the names of the fish from the tips and capes
the canal and bay prayer
At the age of fifteen I knew a thousand gulfs
and without counting the now remote and briny breast of the mother
not a single thought of norway

I had walked between his blonde eyebrows

In an annual caulking of boats called oakum and tar
Erick was twenty years old and a virgin inside his rubber boots and he
believed that children are born just like fish in the quiet night of the sea's
rest, but the pilot uncle told between his teeth long stories of islands with
burnished and blue ports where hundreds of naked women loaded coal
onto the ship where there were green birds boiling with obscene words
and where in the night the brothel flourished with deep breaths of tam-
tam

The uncle mumbled a distant song of sun and coconut trees in a language
that could not have been Norwegian and that put small eddies in Erick's
wind pulse.

At twenty-two years old, Erick had the dense blue-gray gaze of his soul
set in dam and a will to rudder and keel to reach the islands of the sugar
mountains where – his uncle said – the nights smelled of cedar like the
barrels of Ron Erick knew that Norwegian sailors always deserted on the
islands but when they were very drunk the captains kicked them into the
dirty holds and then they returned to Norway thin and silent and sad.

With everything and the kicks, the sailor Erick was already on his way

ANOTHER BEFORE
This is not the story of Erick, after all, who at the age of thirty was no
longer a sailor and was selling Norwegian herrings in his store in Fort
Liberté while Erick's wife, Madam Suquí, prayed to Legbá and Ogún for her
white man prayed in the cathedral for its blonde man

Madame Suquí had previously been a mamuasel Suquiete virgin loose on

the town dock made from midnight to all hours with ice and edge of
waning turbid female cabin boy from the anchored brothel calcined
ceramics from the soul of a fountain
hymen preserved by the amulet of mamaluá Clarise effective for years in
the shadow of the deep navel Erick loved Suquiete between bouts of fever
chills and paleness and he took quinine in large gulps of tafiá to get the
black girl out of his flesh to chase her away from his blonde head
so that his arms and body would go away
that polished and sour smell of living bronze and drunken jungle to be able
to think of his Norwegian beach with the overturned boats
like dead whales

But Suquiete loved him too much because he was white and blonde.
and changed Mamaluá Clarise's amulet
through the heart of a black hen
that Erick drank on Friday under the full moon with his tafiá and his
quinine
and very soon the French bishop married them while in the mountains the
papaluá Luipié
He sang the Guinea song and drank the blood of a white snitch

In the sweaty night of fevers and marshes

Erick, without a dream, a sailor stranded on the cold and nocturnal flesh of
Suquí, left his dirty lineage of hermatozoans and nostalgia in the belly of
fertile humus of his earthly wife.
and Erick died one fine day between Jesus Christ and Damballá-Ouenddó,
off the pulse of the wind of the sailboat lost in the sargassum, his soul
without a compass flew to Norway
where the memory still remained
of a white woman's foot making fragile footprints in the wet sand

AN AFTER
And so Yelidá came into the world in the wail of a tender cat.
while the white milk was released from Suquí's black breasts, happy with
all her teeth and her shape broken by the blonde husband's gift.
and Yelidá was helpless among the rags

with its juicy clumsiness of roots and dreams

but it began to grow with the slowness of an ear
black one day yes and one day no
white the others
voodoo name and kaes surname
zeta language
iceberg heart
flame belly
seaweed leaf floating in instinct
nordic wind imprisoned in the underground of the night
with bonfires and distant deaf call for the rite

The others only had the suspicion of a nearby danger

while Suquí descended his soul through the night paths of his bowels
and grew fat in its joy as a womb of mystery
pollen tenderness in his llama daughter
for whose destiny the rooster and the owl had no answer
neither the wisest nor the oldest knew anything

The fish knew it and the night and the jungle and the moon and the hot
weather
and the cold weather
and the claw soul of the swamp
and the god who tangles roots and pushes them out of the earth
and the male and female that in the cemeteries
lights green fires on the frozen belly of the dead
and the one in the throat of distant dogs
and that of fear with its thousand feet and its severed head
And this wants to be the story of Yelidá at the end of the day

Key touch
sound flank to the simple weight of the gaze
palate of beast
new snake body of eternal youth for each new moon
complete forever like the myth
hermaphrodite at the beginning of the world
when they dismembered the gods
underground enigma of resin and amber
broken golden rib pact
female betrayal of time liberated
A PARENTHESIS

The Lilliputian child gods of snow

the old men dressed in red
that shake the fog from their beards
and those who blow on the aimless letters of the weathervanes
the inhabitants of the embers
those of the howling wind
those who draw the arctic auroras
the gods of cotton and apple
that have long south and short north
those about the shy and green life of green moss
They slide and play with the ice flowers, the Hyperborean elves of the
sleigh and the reindeer learned the news in the language of dissolved
distant hurricanes.

Varangian blood in the adventure of man's things for women's things was
transplanted on islands of snail and pepper lost was going to be left for its
arctic in the floating fiery archipelago lost was going to be left for its tame
vegetation of orderly pine trees lost was going to be left for Their lost fight
of waves, oil and fish was going to remain for Norway on islands of
condemned fire.

Travelers along the deep paths of the subsoil adorned with tombs where
the fossil dialogues with the rotten root and the loose bone awaits the
trumpet and the secret of the water that washes the sleepless pupils of
the mineral lost by the crack and the grotto and the stratum becomes
dark. The gods of milk and cloud with the sex of a child sought the other
god of a thousand names, the black god of the atabal and the man-eating
assegai, constellation of deaths, Wangol of the cemetery and thunder.

the owner of the glazed eye of the zombie and the snake

They looked for Badagris, dictator of the stab and poison, the loose spirit
of the cane fields where the tafiá is first a flower and then honey, the
father of resentment and anger.
the one who lights the hut at the light touch of his black hand and rapes
all the girls in the wombs of their sleeping mothers

They looked for Agoué, the belly-shaped god of water, half evaporated in
the hot sun and half a prisoner of the swamp, bored with flies and waves
in his house of winds and sponges.

They looked for Ayidá-Oueddó, who is the one who sets the red lamp of
rape on fire
the one that in the deep belly of the bongo cave maintains the hundred
crazy snakes of pain and life
the one who on the night of Legbá releases the dogs of desire, the one
who is divided into two halves by infinite sex, master of the sacred dance
to wound even herself, the tamer of screams and spasms.

Imploring with muted cries, almost drunk from the smell of the island, the
gods of Norway asked to save the last drop of Erick's blood.

the Scandinavian innocence of a drop of blood

They spoke with little blue eyes half-closed
while their blood turned to molten silver because Ayidá-Oueddó danced at
the rooster's crow with her breasts shiny with sweat and stars

But that night Yelidá had had her first lover, she was lying and fresh like a
very rained yellow leaf, sore without pain, almost awake in the hammock
from a very warm dream, she only experienced a beloved drumbeat on
her temples and in her belly she I slept the music and the dance

Through the paths of the worm and the broken ant all hope returned

ANOTHER LATER

With the soul of a spider for the male accomplice of the spasm
Yelidá on the path of her womb
murderer of the wind lost between the teeth of the cave there it was
vegetal and burning
in humid humidity of fungus and lichen hot like everything hot
thing of rotten leaf fermented in the shadows of time and moon made of a
filter and a strange word

in the water of the puddle with its green and its larva and its half-born
wing and its meteoric swimming Yelidá defoliated itself no longer by
ecstasy of white and frenzy of black deep towards the earth and high
towards the sky in secret of furrow and in mystery of flames
FINAL

It will be difficult to write the story of Yelidá on any given day