Esta será mi venganza (Ernesto Cardenal)

Esta será mi venganza:
Que un día llegue a tus manos el libro de un poeta
famoso
y leas estas líneas que el autor escribió para ti
y tú no lo sepas.

(Ernesto Cardenal)

This Will Be My Avengement

This will be my avengement:
that some day falls into your hands
the book of a famous poet

and that you read these verses
that he penned just for you
and that you never know it.

(tr. E. A. Costa 26 December 2013)

Pablo Neruda, Religión en el Este....

Allí en Rangoon comprendí que los dioses
eran tan enemigos como Dios
del pobre ser humano.
Dioses
de alabastro tendidos
como ballenas blancas,
dioses dorados como las espigas,
dioses serpientes enroscados
al crimen de nacer,
budhas desnudos y elegantes
sonriendo en el coktail
de la vacía eternidad
como Cristo en su cruz horrible,
todos dispuestos a todo,
a imponernos su cielo,
todos con llagas o pistola
para comprar piedad o quemarnos la sangre,
dioses feroces del hombre
para esconder la cobardía,
y allí todo era así,
toda la tierra olía a cielo,
a mercadería celeste.

(Pablo Neruda)

Religion in the East

Over there in Rangoon it dawned on me

that gods and goddesses were enemies

of wretched humankind just as was God--

plastered godlings in alabaster

like white whales

godlings golden like spikes of wheat

snake gods coiled around the crime of being born

buddhas nude and elegant smiling into the highball

of empty eternity

like Christ on his despicable cross

all of them—every single one—to impose on us

their paradise

with afflictions or pistol

in order to buy piety or set our blood aflame.

The fierce godlings of mankind

hiding his cowardice....

And over there in Rangoon

it was all like that--

the whole earth stinking high to the sky

with the stench of heavenly merchandise.

[tr. E. A. Costa 22 December 2013]

Purlieu

Her skin is eyes.

Her fragrance is the sense of smell.

What she lacks is the root of all counting.

Sea dresses in darkness and moonlight.

Sea strips bare to pubic blue.

Sea is eclipsed and uneclipsed.

Sea caresses and is caressed.

Sea caresses herself in earthshine.

Have you ever lost the key

and locked yourself out of sea?

[ E. A. Costa  13 December 2013]

El Pez Pescador (La gran desviación)

El pez pescador es bastante raro,

con aleta como caña de pescar

y para otros peces sobre boca

el que se parece a gusano.

Imagínase, si puedes, un pez

y pescador a una vez

y con su gusano muy gusanoso.

(E. A. Costa 8 Diciembre 2013)

The Fisherman Fish

The fisherman fish is odd enough

with a fin like a fishing rod

and for other fish above its maw

what looks to the world like a worm.

Imagine if you can a fish

and fisherman one and the same

and with his own very wormy worm.

(tr. EAC)

Eternidad (Vicente Huidobro)

Palabras puntiagudas en el azul del viento
Y el enjambre que brilla y que no canta

                      LA NOCHE EN TU GARGANTA

Acaso Dios se muere
                                                    entre almohadones blancos

Bajo el agua gastada de sus párpados
El aire triangular
                                                    para colgar estrellas
Y sobre la verdura nativa de aquel mar
Ir buscando tus huellas
                                                    sin mirar hacia atrás

Vicente Huidobro

Eternity

Sharp-pointed words in the blue of wind

and the swarming which shines bright and sings

not a note

      THE VERY NIGHT IN YOUR THROAT

Perhaps God dies among large white pillows

Below the worn water of his eyelids

The triangular air for hanging stars upon

and over the inborn verdure of that faraway sea

to go looking for your footsteps

without looking back...

(tr. E. A. Costa 2 December, 2013 Granada)

Favila* or: The Ember (José María Eguren)

En la arena

Se ha bañado la sombra
Una, dos
Libélulas fantasmas...

Aves de humo
Van a la penumbra
Del bosque.

Medio siglo
Y en el límite blanco
Esperamos la noche.

El pórtico
Con perfume de algas,
El último mar.

En la sombra
Ríen los triángulos.

(José María Eguren)

Ember

In the sand

Has bathed the shade--

One, two phantom dragonflies...

Birds of smoke

are wafting toward the half-shadow

of the trees.

Half an age

Half a century

Half a world

and at the very limit of white

we wait for night.

The portico

perfumed with seaweed--

the last and ultimate sea.

In the shadow

the triangles laugh.

(tr. E. A. Costa  26  November 2013

________________________________________________

* favila = pavesa (burning cinder) and is also the name of the second King of Asturias, memorialized by a famous triptych in bas-relief on the portal of the monastery of San Pedro de Villa Nueva. The triptych shows the king  kissing his wife before he is off on a bear hunt in which he is killed. The poem is a tour de force of layered and intertwined types,  subtle eroticism and mathematics.

Greetings

                          The ice was here, the ice was there

                          The ice was all around....

Are you okay?

Are you today

who you are yesterday?

How is it going?

What is it that goes?

What is it that comes?

Who are these words meeting and greeting

one another as if to say no day had passed

no month

no year

no decade

no century

no millennium

no ten thousand years?

Is recognition the essence of repetition?

Or is it as imaginary as poor cruel Coleridge

lying in drugged stupor

vapored in technique

breathng Bibles

with a hard-skinned Chinaman around his neck

trying to untell the story

trying to sell his barbaric door-to-door rhetoric

to characters more ancient than Tin Isles?

Hello, how are you in yellow Xanadu?

Are you okay?

Are you today

who you are yesterday?

Your ancient forests...all lost, all lost

to ringing and to China....

all lost to China.

[E. A. Costa 18 November 2013]

Question Sixty-Eight

"Cuando lee la mariposa

lo que vuela escrito en sus alas?

Qué letras conoce la abeja

para saber su itinerario?

Y con que cifras va restando

la hormiga sus soldados muertos?

Cómo se llaman los ciclones

cuando no tienen movimiento?"

(Pablo Neruda)

When does the butterfly decipher

what flies inscribed on its wings?

What alphabet does the bee use

in kenning its itinerary?

In what runes does the ant

on the march number its fallen soldiers?

What do you call in any ocean

cyclones & typhoons devoid of motion?

[tr. E. A. Costa 15 November 2013]

Tristesses de la lune (Sangaku—Gunma Prefecture)

                  

                                    The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

                                    The moon in lonely alleys make
                                    A grail of laughter of an empty ash can....

                                     (Hart Crane)

1.

Previous lives are a long unblushing of knives in ice.

Do you embrace the perfect moon and on the morrow

a moon more perfect than the one before?

What does it mean to say she is dark-eyed and moist with white?

That her dusks are divided and multiplied in honey, each a meadow,

each a broken comb?

2.

Fallen walls are secret in their snares, for her flesh is not endless

nor undressed witlessly and without prowess.

It is remembered that she wavered.

Remembered is impassable smile and flawless lips,

night bare and deep with her hips.

It is remembered that she resisted.

Remembered is another life round and imperious as her breasts.

3.

Every machine comes with directions

two-faced like fans.

Annals are a machine.

Menology is a machine.

Diary is a machine.

Her face is the space between.

4.

Unnamed is sudden dismantling come very late.

Is it thereby proved that no woman is a goddess unless craftily embarrassed?

There are few tears, just a half-mad joust that pleases broad day

and her exquisite mouth competing with the moon.

5.

Where in the rhythm of the night air is the almanac of her black hair

cascading down her back and at ease with waist?

She is impossible to clothe.

She is impossible to close.

She is impossible to begin afresh.

6.

Disliked are fictions that pose questions.

Flatter and tell them they matter.

Give them a formula or a mystery to crack.

Give them one raindrop falling

from frightened eye to the night flowers.

7.

Body records and remembers and there is no being born again

save in palsied repetition.

There is but one drama and no sequel.

Her suit to be disincarnated is summarily dismissed:

her fate is to be as real and living as the phases

of the moon.

8.

What is now is not what went before.

Is memory a function of the difference?

What follows both?

Imagine one category in intimate coitus with another

and complete complements,

the unequalled and cunning join of a Japanese beam.

9.

Body and antibody are strange and venomous flowers

pressed between the fallen lives of forest floor.

Worm is the interloper who builds ticket booths to a sideshow.

Be digestible and digested in the only carnival on earth.

Step right up--Be prolific. Be pacific. Be specific.

Be quick-footed and elegant in this thicket of copulating words.

10.

Pyramids are built on one foundation: that nothing is final.

Is there one more chance to dance on other mountains?

Wherever your moon is, caged or free,

wide upon the plain or webbed by sleeping trees,

yours is only half the time and space of that remembered

smile on unremembered face.

[E. A. Costa November 7, 2013 Granada]

Mamood's Tale

“There is a bird," said Mamood, “who flies underground and eats children.”

The words hang like icicles in the warm night.

“This bird,” continues Mamood," is plumed in invisibility. We see it only by smell.”

The whole camp tightens with attention. Nostrils flare. Cups of tea hang in the air. Nursing women hold infants closer.

“Long ago this bird," continues Mamood, “appeared to our grandfathers and grandmothers in the air, over the soft soil and in fresh and salt water. They smelled it everywhere. The expanse of its body was measured in weeks of walking and running. It was near from dawn to dusk. There was no escape. Some burrowed in the earth to escape it. It followed them rustling unseen wings. The smell was foul and metallic. Many lost their minds.”

A woman begins to hum.

“I was a small child then,” says Mamood, “Our grandfathers and grandmothers were terrified. Their grandfathers and grandmothers, who still lived in those times, were terrified. The terror was hidden at the back of their hearts, as if they were being eaten alive from the inside out. We children were too young to know anything of it.”

The humming ceases. No one reaches for tea.

“Dream came to a woman of our clan. Her name was never to be spoken again. It meant 'Forehead' in the speech of those times, which is not our speech now but another secret tongue. Dream was bright red-yellow, like the fruit of the bitter orange. Dream told the woman of the unspeakable name to weave a carpet of pure light and cast it upon the air.”

Not one dares breathe.

“Our grandfathers and grandmothers labored for forty days and nights weaving this carpet of thought, this carpet of mind. We children, who knew nothing of what they were doing, brought them tea and candy and cooled their foreheads with damp rags. We wiped the blood from their eyelids.”

There is a murmur as if something has been remembered.

“When the carpet was finished, “ says Mamood, “ it bore the image of a bird, wings spread and perched at the center of the world. It covered space from here to there, from yesterday to tomorrow. It was immeasurably large and though light as air a heavy burden. Grandfathers and grandmothers labored to throw it upon the air as a fisherman casts his net.”

The humming resumes.

“With much groaning and sweating the carpet was at last cast upon the air. It floated for the space of two new moons and then fell to ground here as this common carpet between us. Smell, my fellows—smell the cool clean night air. The great invisible bird who ate children was enmeshed in what fell from the sky, what emerged from the earth, what rose up out of the fresh and salt seas.”

Several reached for tea.

“As children we trod upon it laughing,” said Mamood, “The bird has never again risen into our world. It is intricated here in the image of our minds. It is completed. It is finished.”

A drum of stretched hide sounds. A young woman arises clicking castanets and undulating like a fish. A young man shadows her shaking a tambourine. The fire flares. Children run out of the darkness dancing.

The long night yields at last to soft red dawn.

[E. A. Costa March 2011--November 2013]

Procrustes

A Greek peasant, gift of the Peloponnese

moves to the United States as a small child.

He sees television for the first time.

He examines the set closely.

He asks his parents how people got inside such a small box

[E. A. Costa 31 October 2013]

Any Exit Is An Exit

Any exit is an exit.

Any egress is an egress.

Duchamp's door is an incitement

to go through the wall—no less, no more.

That's all, folks.

This way to the excitement.

This way to the wall.

And as you pass

don't forget the mustache.

[E. A. Costa 25 October 2013]

Middle Solstice (Winter in Granada, Nicaragua 2013)

(dedicated to Alvaro Rivas)

(1)

Across the desert of salt-sea

swan-necked camel

drinks the metaphor of his hump

bearing unimaginable answers

to questions never asked.

There are no years. Only egg moons and tortoise suns

losing seasons slowly in the see-saw.

Days and nights are drawn between grandmasters

and every bluff is called.

Where goes Spring where Spring has never been,

where goes Autumn where no Etruscan duels to the death

over necropolis?

Where sleep Spanish before

Columbus discovers the hammock?

Bells swing in new air--ever level:

¡Gracias a Dios hemos salido de esas honduras!—“Thank God,

we have left that dark & backward abysm....”

Swinging in warm air--¡Gracias a Dios!

Is there not invoked therefore

the rule of threefold repetition:

one Summer, as everywhere hot?

And the winter of twin sisters—one warm torrential rain

and other mirrored as a secret undercloak

like an ancient Christmas in Mexico?

Just what climate is worn under the skin?

What year are skulls knit and bones born?

It is not a question of checkmating Borges:

sighted or blind stand reversible seasons

like upside down Europeans.

Jaque mate!

Here at the center of the center,

here in a Mandelbrot set of isthmuses fresh and salt,

here at wasp waist corseted by lost and found oceans...

(2)

What the world new and old is missing

is objective comedy—

Columbus the compact car

out of which emerges an endless line of clowns

Marco Polo the cosmonaut shot out of Italy like a new Midas

to discover the Golden Horde.

What is the exact date Britain discovers Hindus?

Where is landfall?

Does tribesman tattooed in woad

mark the side of his wheelbarrow?

(3)

When all is said and done blasphemy is an absurdly simple proposition:

first--create an inner speech of any number of elements;

second—combine & permute;

third—except.

THE CHRONICLE (September 13, 2013):

today

slighty west

of El Malecón

was dedicated

a monolith of polished black granite

with the full face of Rubén Darío in bas-relief

looking up La Calle Calzada toward the center of the ancient city of Granada.

El Malecón means “the jetty”.

The jetty thrusts into the freshwater sea.

Calzada means “road” or “heeled”.

On the reverse

of the monolith

facing the jetty

in large letters

is Darío's La Fe:

En medio del abismo de la duda
lleno de oscuridad, de sombra vana
hay una estrella....

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

(4)

Here winter is the rhythm of rain

coming and going like clockwork

day and night.

Here winter is the rhythm of rain

on tiles and corrugated roofing

with complex subplots on bamboo

and barrels

on broad leaves in inner gardens

on concrete as old as Romeo

on streets and sidewalks,

rain that sings and talks

that stops and chats

that whispers and clatters

that bellows

that drowns

that cools and cleans

that lightens with monstrous thunderclaps

while a middle-aged woman waits

under eaves

sees her chance

signs the cross

and dashes through downpour in fear of electrocution.

Now and then there are miracles—how harnessed horses

stay dry and docile while the teamster bails

how (it seems) it never hails

how dogs disappear...

(5)

If rain is tears

time is interlinear.

If rain is mercy

space is transversal.

If rain is season

it is a station of the cross.

(6)

THE CHRONICLE (September 13, 2013):

[except]

until today September 13, 2013 the main feature of El Malecón was

a statue of El Fundador

Francisco Hernández de Córdoba

back to the freshwater sea

and facing west along La Calle Calzada to the center of the ancient city of Granada.

This dramatic prospect is now interrupted by the backside of the monolith of Rubén Darío,

drunkard and admitted poet

no child of Granada

founder of nothing....

[E. A. Costa 15 October 2013]