These poems were originally published in Sergio Raimondi, Selected Poems. (Liverpool University Press, 2023). More can be found here
WHAT IS THE SEA
The sweep of a trawler net across the length of the bed,
mesh at maximum, in the tank seven hundred thousand
litres of fuel, below bags of potatoes and onions,
shifts lasting thirty-five hours, then sleep for four, some coffee,
agreements signed in offices in Brussels, increasing
illex squid in proportion to the water temperature
and the approvals signed in the Supreme Court, a circuit
of channels made of stainless steel into which the catch falls,
pollock, hake, permit transfers being made with approval
from the Agriculture and Fisheries Ministry; there:
the fishing boat crosses the imaginary line, goes
after a stain on the screen of the detector machine,
the shoal ignorant of the notion of miles or charter,
of the made-up Fisheries Institute stats or the gap
between wages and living costs since 1992,
the long-tailed hake fillet, Seamen’s Union and rattail,
faked credit letters, lamps and Asian flag of convenience,
the outbreak of foot and mouth among British herds, hoki,
chucking back to the very depths tons of dead cuttlefish
when langoustine (which has five times greater value) appears,
storage infrastructure and cold, and fishing ground, all that.
MEDITATION ON THE PORT LOADING STATISTICS
What’s lost before unloading in the terminal
when they undo the nozzle so as to put in
the forbidden tablet to get rid of weevils,
plus what falls between the badly positioned slats
of the container when the lorry jolts about
because of a poor manoeuvre by the driver
or the irregular ridges made by the sun
and the heavy passage of wheels in the tarmac
is nothing if you bear in mind the final load
in ships destined for Brazil, China or Iran
is more than two and a half million tonnes,
but the pigs and chickens don’t wonder about it
all the same, and nor do those who live in the huts
of breeze blocks and corrugated iron by the road:
headlights in the glasses of Moisés S. Rodríguez,
who brushes pavement and tarmac from side to side
and with the shovel gathers earth and wheat, bags them.
That is not a double-elasticated sheet bound
round a trunk; it’s the sieve that’s used to tell
the useful from the also useful, but less so.
What he is thinking while the thick thread and needle
just millimetres from his eye pierces and sews
another full forty-kilo bag, which he lifts,
then places on the pile by the entrance door
under the sign in chalk WHEAT FOR SALE, I don’t know.
TOWARDS A STUDY OF THE EXPORT ECONOMY
NATURE IS NOT A BANK
Although the cut wheat sheaves, in the last of day’s light,
seem to shine just like gold, Nature is not a bank,
and the suppleness of the stalk does not permit
economic metaphor, except when it breaks.
And therefore the great harvests favoured by the rain
were not enough in 1870 to amortise
the deficit incurred through significant loans
signed in London that enabled the extension
of vacant credit with which they hoped to purchase
the steam harvester. Importing to export, not
to import more. One or two years without a cloud
and the harvester needing a spare, and the huge
figure of the debt, the white bones, the dried-up reed
of the bank by the dried-up creek, romantic scene,
at the whim of model liberal destiny
that copies and copies like the literature
of its chattering classes, much, much, and badly.
CESO
What does it mean to lose? It means
that those terms and syntagms
those thoughts discussions those writings
in articles books and pamphlets
and of course also shouted out
Imperialism! Dependence!
Underdevelopment! Masses!
Third-Worldism! Oligarchy!
Revolutionary Process! are at once
unspeakable in the real world
as if in another language
that cannot now be heard.
What does it mean to lose? It means
that right there where they once studied
Das Kapital police study
the student’s criminal record.
It means that the Journal of the Centre
of Socio-Economic Studies
no longer opens with a quote
from the poet Javier Heraud.
It means empiricism has returned.
It means the essay is replaced
with the report turned in on time.
It means objectivity has returned.
FOUCAULT, MICHEL
Philosopher and historian let’s see … can you guess?
A Frenchman whose writings concerning the apparatus
and the institutions of normalisation were read
over this side of the orb with military regimes
in mind or rather inscribed into the joints between bones
and our worn, nervous terminals without ever recognising
how this perspective on a state’s power as a network
total panoptical disciplinary etc.
was thought from a seminar at a once imperial
national college not long since sustained by public policies
unparadoxically powerful; the paradox
was perhaps to pause over Benthamite architecture’s
subjective correspondences while the state was hollowed
without seeing one unsubtle qualitative difference:
the child taken to the neighbourhood school where they correct
his unhealthy habit of writing at a normal desk
with his left hand and effectively finding for the first time
a desk an exercise book a school as well as, of course,
the coercive teacher who is more or less badly paid
perhaps may prove to be a fact less worthy of disdain.
GOLD EXCHANGE STANDARD
So then the philosopher should not continue to seek
the rhythmic memory of a lost language in language
invoking a 12th-century troubadour’s hermetic verse
or see in the parataxis of one hurt by lightning
a will to surpass the communicative by freeing
the onoma from the unbearable weft of blah blah
since whenever we take into account the intimate
relation between the striking of the coin and the words
we would see an act presidential – and performative! –
equivalent to Moses destroying the idolatrous calf
which succeeded in realising the perfect dream of saying
literally nothing in uncoupling dollar and ingot of gold