Kale Borroka

Declarations

 

 

Look.  A lot of water’s gone under the bridges. A seagull from who knows where flies in circles over those bridges, over the river and the mountains. Over the roof of the tallest buildings, under the sun

 

–Together we will or won’t have a chance to imitate those paths of the birds–at our level, over the earth

 

The only thing that will rise up is the twisted flower of our conversations–its petals without contours, with no upper vertex

 

Listen to me. Hide your claws. Bury the warrior’s axe these are not the times of your Indian ancestors. Where else would your high cheek bones have come from?

 

–There are no more potato-eating Irishmen. The Acadians buried the rifle and the cross. My grandparents with their Basque berets no longer cruise the southern seas.  My probable Sephardic ancestors have allowed the traces of their lineage to be erased in that temperate southern country

 

–Don’t listen to the measured words from the city, whose periphery we inhabited, advising you to be calm, sweet, everything in moderation. Stop going to the pushover therapist,

educated in the suburbs, just out of college. The people who know say two things:

 

–Poetry is subject to a specific form (this sounds like  prose)

–It has to be about universal themes that everyone can understand. Don’t cook fish by itself and don’t bake the cookies.

 

Don’t walk the streets of Chinatown, sulky, remembering. Accept the complicity of my eyes more than that of my hands. Of my brain more than that of my genitals. Undo the tangle that

imprisons us as you would pull the kernels off a dry cob of corn, like the ones you use to feed the pigs on your farm...

 

 

There’s a reason we’re the only real poets around here, in this place filled with small circles, professors in suits, and housewives who write in their free time. Like a hungry condor our poetry has to let itself be carried away by the storm. Deposit your life in this rhythm that’s come from the other side of the world, that joins yours, a current that sprouts from the North Pole. Together we can do anything, even revolution. I is not an other.

 

I is an other, if you didn’t like the one I was wearing before I’ll hide my claws and file my fangs. I’ll cover up my tail with a long coat. I will cut my hair and look for work. I will stop drinking coffee with my female friends,  always endowed with ulterior motives.

–I’m going to stop laughing at the poets here in the recitals. I’ll stop drinking beer and smoking. I’ll stop eating raw oatmeal in the morning—it makes me nervous—with honey or sugar, or with jelly if there’s any around.

 

You’ll go back to wearing your long faded skirts, and tying your hair with a ribbon. And gathering herbs in the river

 

And I’m telling you for the last time: A walk through Chinatown is worth more than the best published book. A cup of coffee at the market while listening to a certain street musician is worth

more than a reading at Harbour Front.

 

I’m going to buy new blue jeans. I will say hello to your feminist friends. The architecture of what must be done rises up, still transparent, vague, and complicated, like a Piranesi. This advice sounds fishy (the sacred animal of Edessa). We must recover the space of these thoughtless and hard-working people

 

The fact that we’re together is a universal revolution (assuming I haven’t gone completely crazy)

 

Your friends and mine tore their hair out, tore their clothing, threw ashes on their headsAnd left with their music for some other place.

 

From  “Reflexión hacia el Sur”

Translated from Spanish by Kate Grim-Feinberg

 

 

 

 

 

Workers of the Void

The men in their forties sip coffee in downtown cafes, among them a few Lebanese and Spaniards, and also Carlos Collao, Sergio Valenzuela

Bruno Hernandez, in the Haiti Cafe, the Brazil Cafe, coffee cup suspended between thumb and forefinger, for a few seconds, looking past the waitresses’ tiny white aprons

As if toward a utopia of eyes, legs, scraps of youth, assembled against a backdrop of smog, beyond it the Mountains

– Like a patient who suffers from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, we stare for a few seconds
Someone waves a hand up and down in front of our faces then says to friends or family, “There’s nobody home”

And in those days we lived out the project of our dreams and the revolution. We wrapped ourselves in flags. The birds sang every morning. And it wasn’t just coincidence

And we looked over our shoulders at those others, those we met, middle-class speculators, practical men, construction workers, who cobbled together in the end their miserable versions of the scaffolding of their lives on the other side—or so we wanted to believe—of our barricade

Let’s exclude Skinny Ortega, near-sighted and tall, distilling his office poetry, full of clichés, full of tremendous images, but with a natural beauty not seen in more refined productions, and whose basic facture annoyingly lingered on the page with ingenuous self-confidence, like a beautiful girl still in her teens who hasn’t yet learned to do make-up

Let’s exclude the avid youth who read standing on buses, or sitting on park benches, who sometimes cut pages out of books so they’ll fit in the pockets of blue blazers

And Paco Soler, Gianinni, who talked about the void in their seminars, contrasted Being with Nothing, Essence with Existence, making another notch in the handle of the battle-axe in the search for the basis of reality

A search unresolved from the get-go in their love for the books of the CULTURAL FUND, LOSADA, GRIJALBO, and GREDOS PRESS. In articles of the JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY, not even surrendering easily in COURSES ON PROPRIETY, in conferences

Let’s mention in passing the disciples of Scientology, the COF and Youth Power, all the people who study at the Institute of Harmonic Development in Paris, sitting at the feet of Gurdjieff, the followers of Krishnamurti (discovered by Blavatsky when he was just a child)

The readers of cards, diviners of the various versions of Tarot, practitioners of transcendental meditation, repeaters of mantras, singers of Hare Krishna, with shaved heads, dressed in orange, who eat very frugally

All of those various groups who sell flowers and magazines at grocery store entrances. Who dig holes in the ground and then fill them up again, who do exercises for concentration and relaxation

Even though we would prefer other more serious things, philosophy, politics, we’ll shrug our shoulders, we won’t go beyond irony, our intention is good

The void lies in wait, it’s true, of all those who are threatened by death that we suppose are the majority. Let’s not doubt that finite creatures possess scant capacity to manoeuvre in any field. A logical mind can be as good as experience

It looks as though the vast historical constructions that traced their luminous lines in a not-so-uncertain future are retreating in the distance

Let’s give ourselves the liberty to focus our attention on the minutiae of daily life. In this, let’s be like a drunk who suddenly halts his nocturnal ramble, and after urinating looks at the stars
and says shrugging in a rather loud voice “What’re you gonna do? What the hell, in the end…”

This is not our product, we aren’t the ones who invented it, or am I wrong?

But what’s more pitiful is the situation of someone we don’t want to name and who after turning forty discovers that “nothing makes any sense.” Whatever you say but it sounds to us
like a tango

But what’s the position, then, of people who count on the void and say, “On this I will build my church,” and on it manufacture their most fantastic linguistic constructions, political manoeuvres, amorous persecutions, lifestyles, and schools of thought

And hope warms like a cigarette butt in the bottom of a pocket we can smoke later on

Maybe one of these days it won’t be used up and we’ll go on smoking eternally

While in the end, we, humble, common people

Choose brands of cigarettes, haircuts, places for lunch or dinner, books, a few stories to tell

Resigned, looking from this tenuous line at the edge of the precipice to which all of us, like it or not

At some point sooner or later, will have to fall.

 

Translated from Spanish by Kate Grim-Feinberg

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Ode to Greta Garbo

 

The season of the skylark ceasing to whisper along telephone lines, causing person-to-person calls to flourish and sing, ceasing to whisper in the background of female voices when they answer in whatever language or sing on the other end of the line. The most satisfied men are the least productive. For the time being, we find ourselves given to the description of very particular matters. What can we do? We didn't invent the world or history.

All the disheveled and aging travelling we elaborate like a spider or a snail. At this precise moment a thin young man of indeterminate age passes by, smoking. While the afternoon arches itself like the back of a white cat that grabs the orange of the world and bites hard. Like an imaginary mouth I lift those full, silky skirts. I pull down your gaudy, violet-pink stockings and nibble your slender sex, covered in soft down, the other extreme, the reason for your mouth.

You were able to annul the dimension of your poor brain, always inclined
to take flight, besieged by the fragile weaving of the body's skeleton.
Caged in the old familiar tales about the WHITE KNIGHT, the taste for sex,
the tedium, the tendency to oversleep.

The wit of your laughter and the voracity of your eyes and fingers rise up like a butterfly with heavy velvet wings. Here, in these latitudes, frustration turns us into consumers: how many packs of cigarettes, how many cups of coffee have crashed against my lungs and liver together with the juices of your inexpressible, shaking the firm, methodical meshing of the revolutionary world order, uneven and combined? Like a flourishing of faces and arms that burst into the apartment of the so-called INNER LIFE.

A swarm of bloodied, lithographic paper attacks us and makes us teeter at the corner when we’re already walking along, shaky from tobacco and booze, and the daydreams over which you reign like a Greta Garbo in the celluloid of the twenties, unchallenged and unchallengeable, lifting a white thigh trimmed with a black garter beneath the frills of a short, black can-can skirt. Let your well known silhouette and face publicizing brassieres and dresses, the upright high heel of the shoe, the top hat and the platinum-blonde hair be   like a candle at night in the middle of a pasture that attracts and sets fire to all the insects on television and the hidden longings (not just ours) that suffocate and  cloud Revolutions & Humanism, that relativizes and shapes Aesthetics & Epistemologies. With a flustered expression of the eyes, a fluttering of the eyelashes, a short phrase in bad French.

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