The day after the party
The ocean’s blue diamond bends through
the blinds of your childhood room
a glass of warm water
rests on the little red table
You said that your dad made it
like so many other artifacts, homemade inventions,
knick knacks
that today bloom like seedlings of sword ferns
from the damp of the earth
Out of the corner of the window
a gathering of spores tremble, sway without haste
till they die eclipsed by the summer sun
I confuse them with the remains
of ashes
that linger in the fire
of this burning city
It’s not yet noon in the Quinto Sector of Playa Ancha
and the twittering of turtledoves, seagulls, thistles and
egg sellers seeps
through the cracks in the hill
Out there, further still, you can hear
the engine of a car speeding up the ravine
the humming of your neighbor as she tidies up
and the bolero on the radio singing
Soy tan pobre, ¿qué otra cosa puedo dar?
It’s Saturday morning and your bed
is an eye into the ocean
that blinks open to the day after the party.
Poems from Río herido
How do you write a name
that was born wounded,
before it was written
before the origin
of the letter?
The river is a voice
that won’t
keep quiet.
What opens
in the language
of the waters?
My dead
are not history.
They walk without tongues
howling
like replicas of the sign.
What good is it
to write you, if you disappear
into the page
into the current?
The words are no longer bones
but ghosts
buried in their mouth.
A gathering of phonemes
that fold
under silence.
The river submerges us
in the rolling of its waves.
I place stones in my pockets
to ensure the descent.
In the vestige of the sign:
we are born
from rage
from poverty
from oblivion
like moss on the banks of the river.
The swamp
announces itself
between the water
and the earth.
Some roots sprout
with the audacity
of an aphonic
gesture.
On their wounded voyage
the elements
dragged by the river create
deep and fertile plains.