THE COLLECTED POEMS

OF ESDRAS PARRA
ESDRAS PARRA (1939–2004) was a Venezuelan writer,
poet, translator, and essayist. She was a founding editor of the
journal Imagen. After coming out as a transgender woman in
the seventies, making her one of the earliest and most prom-
inent transgender figures in Venezuela, Parra published three
books of poetry: Este suelo secreto (1995), Antigüedad del frío
(2000), and Aún no (2004).

JAMIE BERROUT is the author of books of poetry, fic-

tion, and essays. Editor of a monthly publishing series that
features writing by trans women. She grew up on the South
Texas/Tamaulipas border and currently lives in Philadelphia.
Follow her on twitter @jamieberrout.
THE COLLECTED POEMS
OF ESDRAS PARRA
Translated by Jamie Berrout
Featuring art by Luvia Montero
& an essay by Aristilde Kirby
The Collected Poems of Esdras Parra (2018)

Poetry by Esdras Parra

Translation and book design by Jamie Berrout

First Edition.
This copy is part of an advance printing.
 CONTENTS

Este suelo secreto (1995) . . . . . . 7

Antigüedad del frío (2000) . . . . . 203
Aún no (2004) . . . . . . . . 283
Reflections . . . . . . . . 315
TO BE HUMAN ONCE MORE
ESTE SUELO SECRETO (1995)
dedicated to Débora Bata,
with friendship and gratitude
 Go silently into the kingdom of words.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

My dreams are rough and linger, because I’ve survived the

temple of pure reality

Pierre Reverdy

Every poem is realized at the poet’s expense.

Octavio Paz
If the will finds you as a yearling
its wind-like figure
you must place the molar
in the eye of the needle
you must be a yearling first
then seek the liver’s perfection
the faces of the cold and the wonder
to be human once more.

Este suelo secreto - 11 -

 Oh dream
scratch your origin into my mask
fall for me
your body does not rest
in the same sand of my senses
nor does it rock gently in my night
reclaim the wisdom
that extends its shadow toward sleep
and sows its words
on the other side of the day.

- 12 -
Don’t wait for solitude
to wipe out your bank accounts
beg the sun
the air
to tangle up your ghosts
in the no man’s land
that is the night.

Este suelo secreto - 13 -

These rumours about your life
burn your lips
they drag along in silence
the rancid bread of your thoughts
don’t stop at the threshold
of that dwelling
which billows dust and ashes
over your head
the nostalgia
the forests
wrap themselves around your legs
while you pursue
the faithful chimera.

- 14 -
You’ve traversed
the gaps in shadow
a fractured yesterday
the science of excess
the winter that served as refuge
for your sleepless nights
now comes back the colorless page
of your miraculous captivity
with the premonition
that you will not return.

Este suelo secreto - 15 -

Of your unruly pain
only the gasp remains
the patience perched atop
the nape of your neck
and though you wish time would
seal its coffin
and the houses spill empty
you won’t gain from the sorrow
but threadbare worries
and an ache
beneath your ribs.

- 16 -
Nothing belongs to you
only cold showers
and skies without daybreak
the tyrannical silence
you’ve never wanted to comprehend
and the yoke of the oxen
that pull along the heavy district
of your desires
tailor-made
but the snow hurts
when it falls over your heart.

Este suelo secreto - 17 -

You always ask yourself
what exists beyond
the nightmares

I believe in them

I subject myself to the strong downpour

lift the cover over my loved ones
fall on my back over the silence

like the thin film that separates

the sea from the storm
which you are
rather than break the habit.

- 18 -
Don’t search within yourself
for the rain that’s fallen on your house
for the rain that drinks more of itself
the worse it storms

don’t search within your work

which moves among different rooftops
and envelops you with its clamor

nor the nervous gold

turned to dust toward midday
all around your head
which has at last a simple death.

Este suelo secreto - 19 -

Grant yourself the space for serenity
oh body
adorned by doubt
threaded with pain
to which you always return
which only feeds your mysteries.

- 20 -
 Make haste
this is no time for collapse
no one accompanies you
the fire does not grow on trees
but it falls overhead

I’ve cut down

each one of your fears

I’ve thrown the foundation

of your riches
atop these ruins.

Este suelo secreto - 21 -

Grant yourself the space for calm
follow the tracks of your silence
it will lead to the clarity
of your tongue
but there’s nothing save dust and smoke
in the confines of your desperation.

- 22 -
I’ve seen your dreams
in the foliage of your eyes
opening in a horizon of ash
ready for death
and the innocent flame
that leaps from branch to branch
brings you the color of earth
which you should get used to
before the fog
grows within you.

Este suelo secreto - 23 -

Your home is not found on the sea
nor over here
in autumn
a tear will expel you
from the earth
some window will remain
to watch the dying of the snow
but in your desert
there’s only
a mouth that cries out.

- 24 -
That routine become your home
and the stature of your ills
rise to its feet
over the grass
or a clandestine tongue
that crackles from the cold
before your enigmas
and seats itself at your table
just in time for lunch.

Este suelo secreto - 25 -

Don’t give in to satisfaction
with your weekly contradictions
nor the diamond
which you found
between the pages of your own life
life you will not have
before you die
though your legs go shaking
or you rebel against your destiny.

- 26 -
And when you step forward
through the chasms
you don’t turn your head
you adhere to the vision
of the trench and the void
you extend your hands
to touch the shadows
and you smile
though there is a long way still
and you do not slow.

Este suelo secreto - 27 -

At the crossroads
that is your life
where the paths are nameless
and the steps are measured inwardly
as if searching for their roots
there are no secret oceans
nor daybreaks under control
only an endless wait
and the density of solitude.

- 28 -
Don’t lift the stone
where nostalgia sleeps sweetly
don’t trouble the shouts that wander
on their knees
nor remove the fantasy of the hope
which drives you mad before releasing you
from its claws
they cast roots
behind the walls of your house.

Este suelo secreto - 29 -

In the origin of your memory
there is no silent forgetting
only a rigid sleeplessness
a heavenly body on its side
a sky torn to pieces
and the umbilical cord
that ties you to memory
where do you go
when you’re absent from yourself.

- 30 -
The word that signals your enigma
is written in the reverse of your dreams
from a cord made of air
tense
it hangs in silence
on the surface of the night it is written
and written it pierces
the landscape of your days.

Este suelo secreto - 31 -

You lift the air
you put it out of your reach
contemplate that unborn air
its collapse weighs
against your blossomed bones
against the space
you consecrate to your devotion
that air is your final cry
through it you express your immobility
it flutters before your eyes
before enveloping you
with its shadow.

- 32 -
In your shadow is a living flame
many rivers clothed as dreams
stairs that climb toward silence
or make roots in the smoke
there’s a wind that flashes lightning
as if pursued by an absence
an insomniac
made of daybreaks and twilights.

Este suelo secreto - 33 -

This white rain
that falls within you
and plants autumn before its time
which houses its waters
in your marrow
never establishes distance
between its offering and your mouth.

- 34 -
You’ve trusted in chance
which never performed its role well
which lacked the courage to follow its path
senseless fortune
its ear to your night
with fear in its knees
and a hunger that crunches on bones.

Este suelo secreto - 35 -

How it ruffles you
the rooster’s song
and its fire
and the stones moss-covered
from so much waiting
the aching color of the rooftops
the searing window
that allows your days to pass
they hurry toward their death
behind your back.

- 36 -
You’ve journeyed
within your shores
with invisible labor
the pages do not forgive
in those signs
which slide off brusquely
where they navigate the words
where thought
becomes twisted
and memory catches fire

for the flesh and the dust

in which your abyss is recognized
where the abyss drops anchor.

Este suelo secreto - 37 -

You search for the answer
that survived
all your disappointments
or tried to hide itself
in the hollow of a molar
and ended reduced to ashes
the answer that wanders
on its head
to obtain maximum stability
to escape from its desires
and not show its empty face
and take up futile things
as a defense
this answer is condemned
to an eternal life
so that now
you delight in being silent.

- 38 -
If you knew the streams
sowed by destiny
while looking back
which return to the place
from which they came
and the water that goes quarreling
in the pools of your tracks
you wouldn’t set mud
into your wound.

Este suelo secreto - 39 -

The night that asks for you
and separates kindness from hardness
does not share your dreams
does not remain fixed amid the wind
not does it surrender to the cult of the morning
all it seeks is refuge
in that sky without foreboding
of your poor
infinite misery.

- 40 -
There are only tears in your path
and the memory of darkness and fear
solitude stacked up in bundles
wounds that germinate at the last minute
and dust that leaves no trace
and an anxiety unmoved by your complaints.

Este suelo secreto - 41 -

 Stand up
the walls of your dreams
won’t cede their infinite depth
the names that nest
in your body
keep belonging
to your entrails
but the misfortune lacks any magic
though it sustains itself on your saliva
and never knew thirst.

- 42 -
The dark scar
open to your path
residue from the party
after the flaying of the apple
the shortest path of silence
abandoned by heaven
folded over its knees
immune to all contagion
where it can be discerned
shadow of the plantain trees
behind you
and they give their fruit.

Este suelo secreto - 43 -

You’ll never be a knight
or perhaps
the sound that escapes your bones
pursues you from the depths
of your desire
like the reflection of the forgotten
rising up to your heart.

- 44 -
The voices that hurt you
thrown to oblivion
the love that lashes at you
and you do not know its origin
the pain that does not wait
that scours for your roots
and wanders through your dreams
they are not but illusions.

Este suelo secreto - 45 -

Winter has defeated you
and the snow on the slopes
allows its sap to drain
into your fallen arms
the miracle of eternity
climbing the first steps
the failure of impatience
sustained as a last resort
the defiance of simplicity
as a guiding principle
the journey of pain
toward its silence.

- 46 -
If you seek refuge
you will always find it
in the mobile of your days
which at the level of your eyes
walks within you
in the memory
that’s lost with the tides
and never turns back
nor makes of nostalgia
a celebration.

Este suelo secreto - 47 -

You will never see face to face
the fog that you are
the mystery of the days
that navigate with the wind at their back
the song of the dew
whose depths you don’t know
heart that lives
held hostage in the smoke
and does not look toward eternity
the last design of your journey.

- 48 -
Your hand has captured all the heavens
has sowed the seasons and the climates
and set them in a row
waiting for the blossoms
a hand that gave you much work
never too sincere
with defects in its articulations
sometimes almost harmless
but always tenacious and without scruples
and thus easy to deceive
when it receives another occupation.

Este suelo secreto - 49 -

You should be wordless
from what your insomnia has seen
the flecks of the night
lurking in every hour
the death that offers no caress
but sits in silence
upon the roof of your house
crumpled within its space
there is no time for you to cry.

- 50 -
Nothing has been lost in the circle of your shout
where breathes the abyss
that throws off your balance

nor in the extension of the wind

whose heart is the light
to which you never turn your back

nor even in longing

where the kernel’s humility persists
and prolongs the return to your habits

but in the solace

you regain the nature of a stone
its absolute emptiness.

Este suelo secreto - 51 -

You’ve been saved by the myth of your silence
the weapons discarded for their uselessness
the solitude inhabited from far away
the loss of domesticity
the rejection of all tragedy
the resource of the imagination
that goes to the heart of things
the wreck of your past loves
the dead you buried without honor.

- 52 -
Poetry has no age
I said to you well into the morning
as the foliage of the plantains in the patio
trembled at the bidding of the wind

I know your hand abolished the foam

and that you heard the crunching of weeds
beneath the quiet approval of the heavens

you mentioned the falling of the leaves

as an example of your center of gravity

thinking there was no better way

of replacing the writing of poetry
or your devotion for words

you had much to say

and had at your disposal very good reasons for it.

Este suelo secreto - 53 -

Don’t abandon hope
that you will name the earth
this land wounded to its roots
it provokes your challenges
and adjusts to its resonances
each word evokes its origins
forms a wheel at its boundaries
falls from its place when it’s noticed
never responds to your applause
but it establishes the nature
of your destiny
it appears by surprise
and avoids the gravity of your thoughts
it remains quiet before your silence.

- 54 -
This I wish to say as the day begins
the hidden sands that shade the rocks
move toward your heart

so you love the harsh terrain

of summer
which sets your dreams soaring
with the dust
and ascends via the vivid color
of your desires.

Este suelo secreto - 55 -

This absence serves you as a shadow
the wounded spirit your bones exude
the butchered liquor behind the still
that place chosen by the unyielding

every beach or sky of possible firmness

dies on the day of your birth
heavy with centuries

but in your interior

all that moves is the whisper of a forest.

- 56 -
Where is the wall born which forms a straight line
and does not know rest

it collects your paths in bundles

and plants scrub in your memory
multiplies the shadows under your footsteps

with what fervor it caresses its echoes

and liberates the dizzying flight of the wind
before sprouting in your heart.

Este suelo secreto - 57 -

Don’t go within grasp of the roots
of all that journeys toward darkness
once you’ve demolished your language

don’t extend a glance to the fallen fruit

save to see the cavity of your sleeplessness
against the cold sentence and the punishment

it constructs alone the fable of your voice

and makes regress the limits of your tongue.

- 58 -
Hope for nothing
the slow ascent of the rocks
their true history
the waves that break apart
or offer the embrace of their tears
the new earth
compressed below the surface
whose echo shakes you
that dream in the form of a salvo
the not unexpected
witness to your capitulation.

Este suelo secreto - 59 -

In the pulp of the bone
in its extreme whiteness
a night will not suffice
to satiate the shame
of having been born
the enigma of your fervor
for the light
which demands a hearing
before the birds.

- 60 -
You’ve sunken into your tracks
you’ve scoured in the brambles
the hiding place of your past misfortunes

and the memory scattered like ash

over the fervor of your years
pursues the voice
on the reverse of the page
now you speak the exile of your innocence.

Este suelo secreto - 61 -

You’ve nourished yourself on hope
the foliage of the custom
which made you a profession
out of paradox
that’s why you’ve become lost
your lamentations
carried to a slow flame
toward the interior
of your discord
which is your home.

- 62 -
Don’t forget patience
the place without origin
the reverse of your self
it’s perched over your ages
at the center of the flesh

nor the dew that emanates from your voice

the fruit of your silence.

Este suelo secreto - 63 -

Settled into your memory
you try to survive
sleeping in open air
nourishing yourself on sorrows

because you tremble

with the liquor of forgetfulness
that’s why you live
in the pulp of the day
which gathers in fragments
your fable.

- 64 -
You can’t find the portrait
of the solitary one
the one who says farewell
nor do you adjust to the tear
that sleeps in your dream
scarcely do you tie the stone to the river
and you ask yourself about the scorching
of your silence
the final stage of your pilgrimage.

Este suelo secreto - 65 -

What is reborn remains within you
wait for it to come loose
that voice made of seeds
the indivisible day
which hides behind the living flesh
with its solitary rift
open at your kidneys.

- 66 -
If the will drives you
to the summit
allow the summit
to tell its tale

liberate it from your lips

make it gain the light
until it overcomes the pleasure
of being a trace.

Este suelo secreto - 67 -

You never put your myth to the test
you scarcely consoled yourself with faith

the shadow of your moorings

has sunken into the sand

and has no shores

now you discover the dawn

that blooms in mystery
and prolongs your thirst.

- 68 -
But now this cold effort
makes your bread
it blushes like precious gold
it casts shadows on your days
and if you see the nakedness
of the mirror
there you’ll find
its subterranean word
deposited in the white of the eye
maturing in your voice
suddenly asleep.

Este suelo secreto - 69 -

You’ve explored in the luxury of your loved ones
what was always a harmony, full
of permissions. Now you can rest from
your miraculous body, which you rescue
every day, or hang up on the cord
beside the bedsheets condemned to an
extreme rigor.

- 70 -
One day you forgot about your body
that image of a child
with a beginner’s language
you forgot the pride
nearer to a snare
that wanted nothing of this
during its gatherings
and you forgot about what
hardened your shell
that every so often
changed its hardness
or gave over to its excesses
with sufficient fury.

Este suelo secreto - 71 -

You didn’t overcome the obstacle of hope.
Nor did innocence come to your aid, oh
body without a heart that has dug its
misery without knowing it yet, without an
idea of the deformity, of the reality,
of the fatigue provoked by the accident,
by the germ of your exile.

- 72 -
You’ve gotten used to solitude
to the path devoid of parties
to comedy without adornment
where nakedness
is a secret of the earth
told in a whisper
barely a stammer
or an illusion.

Este suelo secreto - 73 -

You’ve made from your language
an existence
a face turned
toward the blast of gunpowder
from the night a dream
facing toward the sunset
each word takes the last train
in a journey that stretches out
along the cool water.

- 74 -
The circle of voices
you’ve drawn about yourself
in which every nightfall causes pain
compresses your tongue
and does not discard misfortune
but vigilance takes you by the hand
same as the lament
of a farewell
and seizes by storm
the workings of your home.

Este suelo secreto - 75 -

Alive you remain
and place your hand
on solitude
on the shoulder of tragedy
as if it moved
with your destiny
your face mature
under the rooster’s song
doused in the dust
that cannot wait
to drown your secret.

- 76 -
You’ve put up a fight
but conversely
lacing together your hands
filling them with light
you’ve transferred
your defeats
atop wheels
considering
their uselessness
for domestic purposes
in accordance with their size
or their common matter
as a test of your prudence.

Este suelo secreto - 77 -

If your path depends upon the earth
there’s nothing left but the drunkenness of the woods
the summit of tears
whose use has been written

but you’re made restless by the movement

of the crab
as if it were an imposture
a dimension hidden from the rocks
which it is necessary to leave empty

but fatality is at the end

of your contradictions
their displacement below water
gear assembly with a like number
of possibilities
their interior difficulty
which each time grows larger.

- 78 -
The childhood that throws shadows like smoke,
held in suspense, its back turned to your brief
life, pushed to glibness as a result of
your excesses, threatened by the gleam of
your blood, which you observe through the
keyhole, modified by your desire and your
idleness, pulled red-hot out of the oven, that
childhood which has not been true to you, much
work it has taken you to order it properly.

Este suelo secreto - 79 -

At the edge of your country
there is no sea
but the wind greets you
with its arms
it lifts its mule back
to offer up a sacrifice
as a sign of peace
a crown of ships its islets
it sinks its bones
into its imperfections
as if they were mere vestments
leaving free its entrails
to conquer the roots.

- 80 -
Who to ask
after your loved ones
who at midnight
drag themselves across the land
returned at last
to their nonexistence
locked atop the crevices
that surround their steps
in the density
of their nakedness.

Este suelo secreto - 81 -

Your life is like the birds’ singing
it springs up from the color of the hours
like a dead end street searches for its path
and clings to a wisp of hope
like the earth when it halts its step
like the ruined wall that ascends
toward your absolute destruction
or sees no farther than its nose.

- 82 -
What you ignore
rolls about your feet
like the dawn fallen
from the closet’s heights
with enough precision
made greater on its route
where you slept
full of nostalgia
you never sensed the emphasis
that quarters your dreams
nor the void
which you set wandering
in the mud.

Este suelo secreto - 83 -

Joy is what you planted and not drought
in the dust

what has slopes by another name

and behaves in a particular way

because of the harshness of summer

of this summer

crowding, swirling about your door

without seeking permission to roll with

the stones
circling about all year

while you plow the arid wind.

- 84 -
In your memory the forest is born
the forest and your memory
are born within you
remove the lips of the memory
and you’ll see death face to face
though you are no tree
still you are born in the forest.

Este suelo secreto - 85 -

In this hour
rescued from the days
rescued from the winds
when the silence
hides itself in
the middle of the stove
for respectful tact
and melancholy
that signal of despondency
perpetuates the assassination
of all the powers
which you never had
which betrayed you
which will no longer serve you.

- 86 -
Upon this sky sculpted from stone
upon this granite
you can build your path
go down to the heat of the rocks
interrogate yourself with respect to this point
squeeze it with a thumb
as if you dealt with some
festering wound
separate it from the rind
of the skin or the ashes
that evoke monuments
burial mounds in depth
carved outside of its jurisdiction
you may
if you wish
even out your pride and misery
change the course of the currents
turn them toward your purposes.

Este suelo secreto - 87 -

Destiny has shown itself
this dwelling
this barren plain in flames
at the end of the day
where the air is not heard
but burns at a slow flame
with eyelids closed
it marked this
naked home
surrounded by the horizon
and buildings in construction
blooming like carnations
it showed you
at last
this dream locked
in its confines
it adjusted your step to the days
and made it the custom.

- 88 -
You don’t know the wind apart from its cold liberty
settled at the bottom of your respiration
pulled by the hair
when it’s necessary
dragged along by an earring in shadows
receding like a wound torn
open in combat.

Este suelo secreto - 89 -

Still you remain condemned from without
as if the battle continued
asking forgiveness from the molars
that exact so much pain
that the solitude consumes
and that never give you justice
that sleep behind the paths
putting their weapons out to dry.

- 90 -
What lights your face
what burns to the heat of the heavens
and hammers on your heart
sets in motion your vessels over the fields

it’s the defeat of innocence

looking through the doorway
from which your memory enters.

Este suelo secreto - 91 -

Your heart gallops
nearly lost in the dream

moving down to the rubble

navigating against its own storm

it doesn’t take absence from the light

but undresses itself beneath the sky

it adjusts its senses

without taking its exhaustion into account

and shimmers from within

made greater by the day.

- 92 -
The death that pierces the day
and steps on your heels
doesn’t belong to you
but it blossoms in your thirst
it escapes your attraction
for an exile’s life
begging for them not to remember you
neglecting to give proof
to replace your virtues
that bitter death
doesn’t love the evening
but it fits in the hollow of your voice.

Este suelo secreto - 93 -

If at every turn you are reborn
the way you came into the world
pecking at the bird’s back
sunken into the sweat
that drips like a heavenly body
in the middle of a drought
you give your ear to kindness
and die within your profession.

- 94 -
And when you stumble over your voice
with that hoarse form of death
which takes the place of sound
and you charge against the darkness
that pierces you like a dart
the secret that shivers
after the pain
does not save you.

Este suelo secreto - 95 -

The home that has been your shelter
walking on different feet
in the smooth day
which takes little notice of you
to where time doesn’t reach
the home with the living room outside
now goes quiet
side by side reaching up to the sky.

- 96 -
Still you’re sustained by a dream
from which you won’t return
which clamors to you
grinding at your helplessness
extracted from a bit of bread crust
directed toward your ashes

the dream breaks open a path

upon your ribs
at times also on paper
it situates itself alongside the origin
only fatigue
grants it plenty
a crystalline material
reflects it like a flame
with a mouthful of hope.

Este suelo secreto - 97 -

The word that awakens
the late dream
attached to your path
keeps sailing in your voice
it wanders in secret
over the humming of the rocks
and responds to your enigmas
with pain in your bones.

- 98 -
That word yet to be spoken
roams over a
common land
far away from its
proper paths
eroded by the pressure
in its center
converted to a trembling torch
that you should forgive your glands

and when it returns

say that you will die
with a full nostalgia
leaning against your door.

Este suelo secreto - 99 -

What you’ve perceived
through the rift in your heart
is a fragment of your secret
a piece of burned out wall
red hot
leaning against your head
sustained by the earth
by the supplication of the earth
in its treacherous fragility
like a constant gaze
tangled in your limbs
in the simple horror of the flesh
written on the extreme end
of your breath.

- 100 -
You have no face
nor grand silences
nor a stranded cheek
nor does that chimera consume you

you lack a window

to put up your walls

but you build a cry

below the water
expelled from your rooms
with the cold silence
that enters through your mouth.

Este suelo secreto - 101 -

You laid that face
beside the sea
those iron bars with no twilight
the exhaustion that sits
upon your knees
the pain that makes
a bad figure
that tenderness gored
with your hands in the dough.

- 102 -
You long for nothing
the troubles do not break you

you open the gate

that holds you by a wire
in the heavens
expanded by the wind
on the other side of the earth
in the lie
the horizon makes
so that the water scars over.

Este suelo secreto - 103 -

Still you search
for the unhearing river that will placate
your thirst
the submerged distance
in the grass
the calm sky
of the streams
that doesn’t suffice for your mouth
at the subsoil
of your naked self.

- 104 -
Follow your path
still hidden in the mud
open the door
which sleeps on this side
of the wall
and claim the horizon
put your hands to your voice
and quiet the air
that divides you from your exile.

Este suelo secreto - 105 -

The land
that extends to you its hand
and navigates your heart

the field where dreams

lay down their arms

the mouth that silences the secret

the mouth where love

has lost its courage
and offers its neck to the executioner

the city where your life smolders.

- 106 -
You’ve been devoted to your fears

you keep them underground

faced against the wall

with their arms raised up

they writhe with difficulty
in the dark side of your mask
before receiving the shovel’s blow.

Este suelo secreto - 107 -

You settle your hand on your heart
lift it up with a fist
where the helplessness won’t penetrate
and the air is its soul mate
and it laughs at the silence
you don’t believe in the whimper
that emanates from your side
where your hand
sells life at a high price.

- 108 -
Your hunger is under the sky
and it dies of exposure
covered up to its knees
scaling the disasters
that make its madness burn
enduring the harshness
of the days
the tenderness of the flames.

Este suelo secreto - 109 -

In your land they obtain
serenity of the heart
by turning over the sunset
so do they strike at melancholy
which has no future
and the abyss is placed
below ground
to seek out its marrow.

- 110 -
You take fear
upon your shoulders
you take it for a ride
you fly steadily without
anyone seeing you
in the territory
from which you’ve been evicted
for pure terror
where since time ago
you’ve disappeared
with your body at the discovery
over the edge of your desires
enduring the gravity
of your illusions
with that discarded fear
fallen to disuse
and without force
among which you live.

Este suelo secreto - 111 -

Patience ought to survive
your defeat
the pain
or the disgrace
which don’t revive you
nor do they light your flame
but only leave a trace
in the winter
in the pooled water
cut to your measure
with a small bit of shadow
in which to sink your bones.

- 112 -
As for your defeat
you savor the taste
of this land without light
that never submits
but its footprints erase
your paths.

Este suelo secreto - 113 -

You’ve made the good wishes
lend ears to your fate

oh whisper of the days

that you surface on the page

at the distance of the heart

maintain sadness
up to your knees

and let the wastelands quake

with that profound murmur
of the earth
which precedes your joy.

- 114 -
When the day arrives
many deaths you’ll have traversed
countries sliced to pieces
roads fleeing in disorder
skies hidden behind bars
lakes abandoned
to the open air
trees cut at the middle
of their anguish.

Este suelo secreto - 115 -

Behind you
there remains only a captive land
absolved in another age
the ancient gale
detained on the floor
like false pain
and there remain scattered steps
that accompany you
with their damp fire
stuck to your mask.

- 116 -
The dreams no longer direct
your paths
spilled over the thickness
of the music
that barely emanates from the air
falling drop by drop
to bristle your hairs
sadness at the refuge
from the wind
only serves as a comfort.

Este suelo secreto - 117 -

Who sings behind
your broad shoulders

the partridge that sleeps

all the days

the ear which goes

walking through the air

but you don’t feel exhaustion

nor fog on this journey

that shoves its way

into your heart.

- 118 -
What stops you from contemplating defeat
which does not reach the horizon
and close its lost door
with a shiver in its back
denouncing the wreckage
of the vertigo that flows through the room
where your bones ring out.

Este suelo secreto - 119 -

You don’t brace the throat
of the enemy
nor the enormous hammer
that stomps the earth
like an instrument of torture

turn your eyes to the ancient home

toward the still air
with a scent of innocence.

- 120 -
What skies do you now seek
that don’t count on daybreak
or what you propose
to carry upon your shoulders
and always you long for
skies fallen into disgrace
stripped of their intimate code
as if you trampled them
with your other foot
they turn their back on you
as you fall asleep.

Este suelo secreto - 121 -

In your rooms
there are no tears
nor stairs that sink down
in shipwrecks
nor sand recently swept
from a dream
only a stone
that blushes before the frost
or leans forward to speak
into the silence.

- 122 -
You imagine your house
continues in ascent
or moves closer to its disappearance
where the rooms are interrupted
and the bricks detach themselves
one by one

the house turns with the sun

it did what it could

with sufficient distress
without letting go its summit
perceiving the end of its madness
the inner workings of its tears
the firmly open wounds
the power of its tongue.

Este suelo secreto - 123 -

Your paths are like the deluge
they flood you with their uneasiness
making the snows climb to your lawlessness
though you ignore nothing of the disgrace
though your body may forget
about pity
or unearth secrets
of which you know less each day.

- 124 -
 What do you feel now
protected from the madness
leading your track into a corner
tearing apart the end of the dream
you’ve replaced
with your collapse
with the confusion of the attics
the immobility of the abyss
that can barely endure its disgrace
and the daily plague
that moves through your body
takes it by the handle
empties it of content
makes it fall to pieces.

Este suelo secreto - 125 -

The words that cloak the silence
return cold into your hands.

- 126 -
Your hope sinks with its mouth closed
it searches for the path of dust
the irony of the summit
the tenderness that’s fallen into disgrace
the trophies making you restless
with their silence
the serene depth
that falls until there is night.

Este suelo secreto - 127 -

You have no past
nor a common life
your heart enters through the same door
you built underground
at such a precious cost
now it tells your secrets alone
with the voices left to their own devices
trusting in your desperation.

- 128 -
The past has set your restrictions
it is near to this humidity
which communicates your melancholy
its destructive grain
your body modified
by the torment
the faceless climate
which blooms to life
or collapses without harming you
or cuts the wings of your bedroom
while watching the disaster.

Este suelo secreto - 129 -

What you’ve inherited
what riots inside your head
the hope that’s displaced
to the border of fatigue
but sure of itself
and it illuminates your afternoon
and that music without roots
which you never lose sight of.

- 130 -
Let the dreams come
raise their fight
let them search for the start
of the day
and that dense company
behind doors
now the dreams
don’t serve you as a guide
they jump into water
after the downpour
close the windows
so the night won’t enter here.

Este suelo secreto - 131 -

Your singing doesn’t stop now
you tie it around your neck
so that it comes and goes alone
that’s why it never runs out of breath
which binds it to the earth
it runs until the sunset’s end
and makes a turn at the corner.

- 132 -
You have no more fear
of the death that leaps with joy
the paths that come to greet
the hillsides
and falter with the heat
your days which remain
in suspense
and bear voices in their hands.

Este suelo secreto - 133 -

And the rain pursues you
you can trust in her
that swept the sky forcefully
and put the darkness at your feet
moving its sides
as if it bore rifles along
the rain that exhausts itself
every so often
yet loses no ground.

- 134 -
You know you wait for nothing
but the wind that storms
between the rocks
the weeds that have lost their way
the evaded water of the cisterns
that undresses your promise
and ties it to the tip of a cord.

Este suelo secreto - 135 -

You’ve trusted in your breath
in the memory of the bellows
that takes shelter in the air
sated before emitting its shout
and blood follows your steps
still blood
full of shadows at its shore.

- 136 -
And soon you recover the radiance of your childhood
the mirror that glimmers standing on its head
the meadows threaded with innocence
the rivers taken from their womb
the bay cedar swaying in the distance
savoring the taste of the fog
a forbidden fruit you encounter on the path.

Este suelo secreto - 137 -

Here blows the wind over the sunken back of
the hills, where one by one you’ve rescued the flavor
of your days: the essence of that ribbon of air opens
a path on your tongue, without too many stumbles,
nourishing your memory. In this way, the silence
imposes its risks, it even applauds the repose that
you give to your breathing, the unexpected turn in
which you order the sounds that precipitate toward
their objective with cold violence, insecure and nervous.

- 138 -
 Listen
your ear has recovered its grace
softly it has raised
the skin of your years
feeling about for the mating
of the rinds
the fatality of its origins

the pain won’t impede your thirst

but will renovate the space
of the senses
that is struck in retreat
extended in the palm of your hand
the one you won’t let die.

Este suelo secreto - 139 -

You no longer dream
but the earth rises up to your flame
earth blessed by the fire
shaken by the fury of your roots
which opened from severity
the earth in its extreme tension
with hands destroyed
every crease a motive for weariness
the condition of the ages
that dominate its exhaustion
lives on its right flank
and creates gaps where the rumor persists
the waters that communicate
their condemnation
and the room that moves round
toward the darkness
lurking within hills and valleys
is your home on the final night.

- 140 -
You inherited also
the wretched earth
fidelity torn to pieces
or something resembling this mystery
when the oven itself is burning
that does not escape your dialogue
and all that you have seen.

Este suelo secreto - 141 -

Your words shine like bones
they’ve seen the dawn
clinging to a side of the wall
and the tongue that flees from the candle
and sighs for the silence
for the encounter of silence
codified by sound
dawn no longer feels shame
in carrying its shoulders bare.

- 142 -
Your nights stay awake out in the open
smoother than a caress
naked as an exhaled breath
turned inside out
they see you fastening the windows
through which they take fresh air.

Este suelo secreto - 143 -

There is no greater devastation
than a landscape sheered of life
the days stripped bare of their harness
which remains in your fist
without you having to visit
but your cry
falls down the edge of the desolation
and opens a rift in its echo.

- 144 -
Nothing suffices now
the depths of the earth
have no resonances
only words between the furrows
a silent fire
devoid of faith
an enigma that’s erased
with every step forward you take.

Este suelo secreto - 145 -

There is serenity in your language
with willingness it abides
by its own rigor
by its evocative destiny
in the natural intimacy of the page
which opens paths in the sunrise
a place that is lost sight of
grown so large it reaches foreboding.

- 146 -
Free yourself from memory
unbind your thirst
the only fountain that takes no side
nor shows support
nor ruins the mystery
where symbols are fed water
but your dream rides over the grass
and dies within itself
like the morning dew
defending its bed.

Este suelo secreto - 147 -

You’ve freed yourself from your guilt
the heart seeks its vigilance
the return of its armaments
the adventure of its union to horror
the intolerable discoveries
of misfortune
that put an end to your devices
and walk in the night
evading the enemy.

- 148 -
You abandoned your childhood, that wonder;
you left your shadow at the edge of
the door, as if anticipating your own return,
as if the sobbing of the courtyards mattered to you,
the voices of the walls, destroyed by the
smoke, the demands of the cedar trees,
inconceivable for the crowd, made
flexible, at the pace of your tears.

Este suelo secreto - 149 -

On the ring
that circles your days
extended toward posterity
the ember that illuminates
the refuse
a sliver of cold
formed by your silence.

- 150 -
And your death
the compensation for a destiny
set prior to your wishes
has built your wounds
has planted moss
in your scars
it gave as your inheritance
anxiety
the cold horizon
this secret land
still without use of reason.

Este suelo secreto - 151 -

It’s not inaction that you seek
rather the face to face combat
that takes you by the hand
which is born and dies in a day
and calls with a bang at your door
lurking like a stranger

that the wheels of this carriage

pierce through and through
your left and your right sides.

- 152 -
But the struggle shakes you
and wants to call a ceasefire
trust in the anvil
on which you pound your heart
to cheat courage
the ineptitude in battle
and always long for
the body
that fights a quick retreat.

Este suelo secreto - 153 -

And the mask that rusts on your face
has broken your foundation
the gesture that ties it to your mystery
the accidents of improvisation
that provide such monotony
and when you pull yourself from the cold depth
of your ribs
you hear water in the distance.

- 154 -
And your poetry
another mask

a tearing to shreds of your path

the breath that pushes

the stones
from one corner to another

as if the earth
reclaimed its voice

the useless tongue

that hides its sores
climbing up a wall.

Este suelo secreto - 155 -

You don’t know what to do with your path
extinguished long ago
traversed only in dreams
with the hope that it drains
through the door
a path you see in a sidelong glance
that goes tumbling down
as if it drank a strong liquor
or fed from your thirst.

- 156 -
You search for a refuge
that revolves around you
a prairie that makes a passenger of you
an age that won’t be a humiliation
to find rest during the state of curfew
and forgetfulness in sobbing.

Este suelo secreto - 157 -

When the stones
claw out their eyes
when the wind comes to their defense
to save the hide
and the darkness denies all passage
wandering around the target
there is no sound nor pain in your head
you only touch bare wood.

- 158 -
You numb yourself in luxury
over the stirrups
you lose your calm
when you reach the coast
the heel doesn’t hold you up now
nor do you subscribe to relief
from the fruit
but you cross yourself
before the greenness of your days
before they take
the path of the stones.

Este suelo secreto - 159 -

You take shelter under the same
roof as misery

you’ve exhausted all your disasters

the yellow light that hides itself

in the distance

the horror of the end unfolding

the memory that cannot be right

but always get manages
to get its way.

- 160 -
The mystery of pain
and absence
doesn’t belong to you anymore
open a space in your routine
it makes you hurl your dreams
out the window
shake the shadow
with which the wind protects itself
from the whisper
of its bad habits.

Este suelo secreto - 161 -

 Far down
inside your heart
in the space you open up
with your wooden knife
separating the flesh from the pain
those twin souls
you raise the earth
from its roots
to discover its truth
with good intentions.

- 162 -
You no longer run from yourself
you’ve broken the limit of your tracks
you’ve given back to the spring
that never wanted to take flight
now you bend the weeping
you divide it in two halves
you sow it at the edge of forgetting.

Este suelo secreto - 163 -

Nor do you hide
from your calling
which keeps burning in your voice
you open up a scar at your border
measuring the longitude
of the nightmare
you can’t tear away from its place
the dust that has turned itself
to darkness.

- 164 -
Now you don’t lament the courtyards
that sink until the sunrise
nor long for the hills
that beat against their chests
because they regret
their weakness
those balconies that proceed
along a bad way
or give into drinking.

Este suelo secreto - 165 -

The ship has not split
any ocean but memory
whose winds pull you
against the wall
and the land you’ve measured
palm by palm
which put an end to your solace
and continues leaving saplings
will not desist from its purposes
though it lacks mastery of its tongue.

- 166 -
Heaven descends
onto the floors of your garden
the earthly doors come open
on their wooden hinges
and there are mornings without pity
encounters that arrive
late to the home
foliage that rustles
while you sleep
rivers that cross each other
with their misfortune
or pretend to travel around the world.

Este suelo secreto - 167 -

You return to the place
that creates water

to the tears
whose volume brings fear

sunken down to the horror

in your chambers

when the solitary growth

has not concluded

nor does it move by chance

in the background of your days.

- 168 -
And you knock on the door
with a visible sound
that shakes you
with an arid sound
that resembles a shout
with the silence of your voice
the door opens
amidst the weariness.

Este suelo secreto - 169 -

And you don’t listen but
the border of this tree
falls away
within your ear
the flame that guards you from hunger
and there is no other step
but the one which leads you
toward the dawn
never to be trusted.

- 170 -
And you don’t think about the shore
of that distant hour
that hides itself behind the rocks
that has only a single voice
or travels toward the heart of the wind
pushed along by fire
never-ending.

Este suelo secreto - 171 -

But the rain doesn’t move you
does not make an example of piety
like taking a foot between your hands
the errors that cause panic
the indifference that calms
in proximity to being the woman you are
and not anyone else.

- 172 -
Until what point do you grow your thirst

until you pour it over the railing

consider it to be lost

take it for another

turn it into mush

hurry it to a trench

make of its defense

a matter of life and death

of death perhaps.

Este suelo secreto - 173 -

 But before you
there are no depths or heights
nor a secret past
nor a tremor to your right
nor a silence in your limbs
nor a beaten humility
nor a difficult fall
nor a laughable hope
nor a true ransom
only garlands of dry leaves
storms lying face up.

- 174 -
You keep trying to be the yearling
with marks the grass leaves
along your back

except the muck

doesn’t stay within reach

doesn’t bend down to hear

your secret

you bind your snout

to the frenzy of your tracks

which your hooves avoid.

Este suelo secreto - 175 -

Now you bend over your breath
already spent
and look toward the singing
toward the depths
of your respiration
that vigor of the journey
a flame escaped from the days
inside your mouth
is a tongue doing penance.

- 176 -
Lay your bristled gray
hair
on the cut corner
set it to wander in the sky
with quiet steps
on various paths
with your spine well articulated
make your hips shake
if they breathe
put the whip around your heart
as if its image had no faults
and try to live.

Este suelo secreto - 177 -

You always hesitate
between the door
and the persistence of your anxiety
in the arrogance of the dunes
that rest beneath your shadow
in the refuge of great storms
more dizzying than the blood
or the silence
sliding down your back
like soap.

- 178 -
But in the heavens
which no tongue licks slowly
with utmost innocence
still with a true modesty
conceiving only one tempo
the opulence of this horizon
that protects you
from your small reasons
it extends over your bed
and liberates the chasms.

Este suelo secreto - 179 -

You still don’t know
how much light has descended
covered in shame
or clean as a bone
settled in your voice.

- 180 -
You’ve never had but these lips
for silence
though the shadow of sound
gallops in your ear
and will not leave you alone
or lose its place in your soft lament
and it dishonors you with its noise
and overflows with words
and your quiet brings no comfort.

Este suelo secreto - 181 -

You chose a bonfire
as lodging for your self
a still bed of coals
its silent combustion
though nothing resolves the anxiety
that ignites you
and prevents the start of the fire being seen.

- 182 -
You got used to calling it
by another name
the shyness of the embers
the modesty of the flame
that laughs at your intentions
that ages along four sides
and scatters ashes on your sleepless nights
making the pain more worthy of trust.

Este suelo secreto - 183 -

If the void follows you
don’t insist on taking its place
don’t expand its impatient fire
each word feeds the burning stake
loses ground
has no access to the abundance
falls on its face over its sentence.
and never copes.

- 184 -
You got used to the wound
that you’ve tied off with chains
the needle searching for a sensible
gap
behind the heart
to desire the moment of steel
and every morning you open the flow
of your mystery
rocking the light in your lap.

Este suelo secreto - 185 -

The windows of your room
showing signs of life
they are not stopped by winter
they don’t enter to reside in your home
condemned to the echo of your footsteps
nothing but prudence concerns them
a sky that’s been stripped of its stars
though within you there’s no yoke
apart from being right.

- 186 -
Beneath you
is that severity
the rumor
the mystery that death won’t give up
and deeper than mystery
is your shadow
even deeper than the earth
than the shadow of the earth
descending alongside you
holding your hand.

Este suelo secreto - 187 -

The hunger of summer
drought in the throat
the wall that’s buried away
behind its whiteness
the memory that drags itself
through your house
they’re perpetuated on the page
the eye takes them
by the tongue
all the way to your mouth.

- 188 -
There are no secrets to your path
nor bridges divested of wisdom
in the steady rise
of your arms
buried up to the neck
in their origins
but your longing
has dominion over your chasms
and it perfects the disaster.

Este suelo secreto - 189 -

You haven’t slept upon the side
that belongs to you
on the other end of the magnet
attracting pleasure to your mouth

the pleasure lying back atop the roof

that burns alone in light
the small ember that haunts you
that never asks for forgiveness
and makes you lose your footing.

- 190 -
When you smile
you’re not standing by the door now
you cradle the rumor
in your arms
you lick the earth’s back
listening to its rumble
against your side
and with both hands
you feel its moisture.

Este suelo secreto - 191 -

Though your dwelling
had no place
though your home
has dissolved in the water
though you question yourself
over these matters
resting a hand against your head
you feel the anger of the earth
on the open sea
in your closed fist
among the silence
you protect from the dust

- 192 -
Yours is the voice
planted in the furrow
that sustains your shoulders
the lightness of the day
the hope that is a
house lying face up
watching the shape of your lips

yours is the silence

the opens your willingness
toward the interior
toward the depths
of your borders.

Este suelo secreto - 193 -

The rain will not grant you being
or having the form of sound
cast in lead
from the fall of the moment
while you
that hear it
without echo
without water
from outside the hand
tearing apart your face
in the wind’s interior
you transform it
into a larva
into bread
in the true midday.

- 194 -
You see the middle of dusk
fleeing toward its life blood
now that dim space
doesn’t dream of itself
you’re consoled no longer by the extinguished wall
that nourishes your conscience
now abolished
the piece of utopia
that hides
in a remote age.

Este suelo secreto - 195 -

The world has become lost to you
the open earth of your home
the stuff of memory
that enters through the light of the flame
and sacrifices its foundation
while behind your back
this process consumes space
as if it were condemned to death.

- 196 -
With rain
the water becomes docile
it gushes through the flayed space
without quieting
the night unbuttons itself
before detaching
from its nakedness
giving shape to your mouth
drooling inside your sinking wreckage
which only seeks indifference
momentarily.

Este suelo secreto - 197 -

Water flows through the sky
it defends itself from your nets
however
you manage to capture this perfection
of tenacity
you turn it over in your hands
placing your name
beneath the tongue
to make more human
its conscience
the conjuring of its secret
humility.

- 198 -
If sometime you wake up
in the middle of your daily chores
the ones you’ve always despised
having lost the familiar feeling
of reclining
on your old habits
if you should wake
that is
without wanting to
because you cannot find yourself
among the scattered fallen leaves
of the ordinary days
that give you no peace.

Este suelo secreto - 199 -

With a struggle over language
that has no end
or it contributes to raising the borders
with that acknowledgment
you walk toward your true form
the one you abandoned
beside the cup of coffee
to which you will return
if some day
you find yourself standing
on the other side of the fence
at the shore of your illusory life.

- 200 -
FOR THOSE WHO ARE BURIED ALIVE
ANTIGÜEDAD DEL FRÍO (2000)
dedicated to María Antonia Flores,
for her friendship
The poem gains if we understand that it is the manifestation
of a longing, not the story of an event.

Jorge Luis Borges, El libro de arena

 ed o ndez de
r l a
L a i

re
s.

no
sus mano

existe p
n

e
co

ro

a el
for m frío
le da

The roundness of the air does not exist

but the cold shapes it with its hands
Why does the mud not move freely with the wind
through this crossroad
rather than keep up the party
but here is our destiny
in the clay that runs down the spillway
and all the water it carries are its tears.

Antigüedad del frío - 207 -

 I choose the great sun among
pastures dripping with cicadas
and listen to the heedless movement
of my desire beneath the nubile earth
At daybreak there is no other joy
than the drunken indolence
of human life
no other sorrow than a scorching thirst
tearing the rivers apart.

- 208 -
Where to begin if the moss clings to its ground
here is the high bow of the mill
a hundred times crushed
and the glory of the courtyard surrenders its mystery
stone by stone
like a challenge
oh anguish submerged in the lichen
celebrated or imagined
in its weightless splendor.

Antigüedad del frío - 209 -

If I give in to insomnia, I return to the greater splendor
I travel with the birds in my agony
and prepare my defenses in the deluge or the months
of fever
I’m not passing through and I don’t know how to waver,
though I hear
beneath my feet, like an underground wind
the rumor of my innocence

I’m the passerby with no partner who prolongs her journey.

- 210 -
You should listen to the crackle of your bones
they’re what carries you to open sea
at the humming of the fig tree
they form the time that remains frozen
or doze off bidding farewell to your only death
present here are the grain and the harvest
above all the turbulent immensity
of the stone that is born of its own self
toward the future years.

Antigüedad del frío - 211 -

May the water emanate or darkness exist, this dilemma
crosses your frozen doorway or it accumulates like the
days you should traverse with your back turned
toward sunset.
As soon as midday arrives with its double rigor,
what is present in it is shaken with the ultimate
flash. Oh sea, constantly in defense of your
tireless burning and extinguished heart.

- 212 -
Greater than this sedentary day is my mask
molten ceaselessly in clarity and fog
on the edge of daybreak or in the age of gold
pressed tightly to my face it defies the wind

such suffering of our wet and inclement heart

torn from a land of sun
I embrace the entire rebellion of my being
and settle on a star to light my cold path.

Antigüedad del frío - 213 -

Here I await nothing and it’s as if I said
everything
I take a step over these ashes
to justify myself, to extend myself
a dark whisper within my blood
and carry the earth toward no place
with time intact and tight
all around me
and this key, the clarity that closes up
my shell
made of the very same bone.

- 214 -
I have blessed this day, this night,
and the hours that escape over the rooftops
the hours, the flowers, the fruits that ripen
in the shade, whose skin detaches every
morning under the scalding rhythm of the sun

where I walk the ebb is no longer sufficient

the slopes and the roughness of the terrain
they curve with the sigh of my steps

I kneel before the wild grass

restless, bound to this kind of illness

which the air corrupts,
which air disperses behind me.

Antigüedad del frío - 215 -

I’m the one who survived, my ribs know
by those cliffs of aloe, at midday,
my bones were disappeared
now I walk in the dawn, my stillness resolved,
searching for where to sink my fang
searching for the line, the strength of my two legs
born of the branches, in the hungry
and dry orange tree that scaled nightfall
under orders of my childish daydream.

- 216 -
I’ll erase this blue shadow, this mad profoundness, this
shore that pushes the air undone by the disgrace
of man. And in the sigh of dawn, in the cry of
black wind, when the rooster negotiates with the stone
and dust settles itself on the ankles, I’ll lift up
the sky far beyond the heavens.

Antigüedad del frío - 217 -

Such a strange time has come to my door, it guides me
through blind passages with its absurd language, and certain
that the earth is near, it makes me spin around
the sun. And from the deep, behind a wardrobe of ancient
provisions more or less ripe it extracts the gaseous
climates, the wet ornaments that give color to the tree
of life. Oh time, perhaps we’ll reach the essence through
weakness, through audacity or pure lasciviousness.
This is my most ardent hope.

- 218 -
Where does this wandering come from
over there
never will we see the horizon
never will our imagination be its gag
with this wind that lifts the rocks
and gives no quarter to the vanquished
and the harvest in the evenings
that suffering in our desperation
which breaks apart to open a path

it’s not enough for those who are buried alive.

Antigüedad del frío - 219 -

How I’ve traversed this silence I cannot hold.
I offered it to the fern, the stone, the stream,
so I continue to chase its impossible
sweep and point my steps toward the lofty lyric
or a fine disillusion. But I should make a decision,
to accept its new challenge, some arduous
task my fingers reject or seek refuge
in the vigil that erupts in the end like
a just reward.

- 220 -
If the day returned gliding through the forest
I’d say, oh forest, here begins your reign
you will be there forever to move the horizon
or betray your dry earth
I hold back this outburst of birds
illuminated
for your benefit.

Antigüedad del frío - 221 -

You don’t need help, your thread is pure reality
that rage of the setting sun
this joy of the dawn down in its new cradle
you feel entitled to take a first step
toward the auspicious spring
without acknowledging the barn swallow’s banishment
its life threatened by the outcome
nevertheless, what slight and tranquil gesture pushes
this moment toward its total disappearance?

- 222 -
In dreams I watch as the knife cleaves the dust
or enters slowly into my heart
there are times when the world loses its charm
then I take the path that’s been refused to me
and I give shelter to its darkest secrets.

Receive this body as if it were snow.

Antigüedad del frío - 223 -

I take back the thread which guides me
toward silence
and ask myself the same questions within
the same darkness

I take back this enigma and unfurl the night

which grows at each point drop by drop
without fear of the hostility of my silence
I see then how the earth walks among the cold
without knowing the answer.

- 224 -
Concerning my enigma, it is always the same:
it builds like an interrogation
or like a bleak answer

the days and nights travel on the same page

more precious than gold
that’s why I insist in battling
in the unfounded hardness of things
in living open to devotion and the incident
without apologizing or defending myself
like when one tries to get free from their webs.

Antigüedad del frío - 225 -

The broken key sometimes calls
with an ancient sound
it will always long for
in the coldness of its entrails
but it never warns against
the indiscretion of its ear
on rising from the bed
where the lock sleeps.

- 226 -
Once more the bird
arrests the heart between its wings
it lets go
of the body the plumage undresses
and when it flies carried by the exhale
with claws clinging to the wind
paddling in its anxiety
squeezing its beak between clouds
already robbed of its rejoicing
it feels the sadness of having died
blinking at the stars
without moving
while earth clings to its eyes

for Armando Acosta Bello

in memoriam

Antigüedad del frío - 227 -

But the game goes on, I make words from it,
other lives, some nostalgia, a breeze, I take the pulse
of the mountainsides, there I plant holes, clear the
dust, carry the earth toward another morning, tear
the silence from my ribcage, I introduce a fist in its
place.

- 228 -
Where to enter that celebration of
dark glimmers
of my lost childhood
with a single glance I’ll return to thresh
those gulfs of innocence
the tunnels will fill up with tears
in the uncertain day
the mildew on its knees from habit
which crushes my heart
and the need to approach dawn
bring me closer each time to my goal.

Antigüedad del frío - 229 -

When I remember the sand buried in the wind
and those blind and bitten stones that fall without
a sound, or are enraged by the staunch persistence
of their shadow and with an invincible swat they hasten
toward their destiny declaring their dark origin,
nothing nourishes me save the light, its flicker sustains me.

- 230 -
With such wonder do you observe
the treasure that memory offers
that glimmer which shakes you
and beats against your heart
and asks you to raise once more
the stone beneath which rests
your solitude of snow.

Antigüedad del frío - 231 -

 If I looked for a role model now
I’d need the night so I could catch the page
I’d need the clamor I struck down
or that fell upon its face

and all that remains is to move the hours

the moments that serve as a ballast
to bear detachment like an old suit of armor.

- 232 -
This spring, this mouth will not suffice
nor the hands that extinguish the water
and keep the thirst outside
it will not be your chest
that receives only stars
to fill your dark sky
but you will not descend
though the thunder unbinds its noise
and the earth shakes its head
with its fury unleashed
oh great little tremor
that discovers your song

Antigüedad del frío - 233 -

I don’t just bring myself near death, she moves among
the branches. I climb what I longed for. I’ve leveled it all,
the scythe survives me: temptation, pedigree, cunning
don’t work here either. What consoles me? Misfortune.
The rainbow comes to my rescue. I sleep without
end on only one side. I am obedient. My future is in
consumption.

- 234 -
What thickness of rock do my feet sink into? Only
the fiery stone molds itself to my fingers, a wandering
stone that rises to my heart on its own, between
fallen fireflies, the roar of combat, in its
buried silence the stone begs forgiveness and discovers
the journey’s end in the waning day.

Antigüedad del frío - 235 -

With the stars raised to the cold hour
the sky ceases its march,
I’ve arrived unburdened of instruments
to empty my heart
on a level field, under the sickle of the wind,
that’s why the song of the night makes me waver,
I cling to the absent darkness
to a simple life
to the silence when my resting arm burns
in the fresh air
I turn my back on my destiny
and follow the lost paths
lying on my side.

- 236 -
What reason could there be for this celestial childhood
the world has granted me, that the world imposed on my
body branded with irons by doubt.
There exists no other flowery way to enter the entirety
of my memory. I break open the floor beneath the sea,
stretched out like a blanket, and I bury there my book
of bitter phrases, my burning ember given form
to pierce my love of life, with a bit of
lachrymose crystal.
I deserve this ship tied to destruction, and
I only long for the apocryphal dust that once
fell above my head.

Antigüedad del frío - 237 -

You
who are never sated
neither do you know yourself
nor do you live for certainty
who might be a multitude
dreaming you will be correct
or thinking you should
conquer that void.

- 238 -
I travel along the path toward the city of the great
migrations, pursued, motionless, manic. What
might be expected of this fizzing up of granite, with
avenues upon which glides the brusqueness of the
seasons and the immense heavens. It’s been
erected by force of the imagination on the empty
page. Oh city, what secret awaits you, what
treasure sustains you like a flame beneath the chimney.
Somehow, the sun forms part of your assembly and
prolongs your erosion.

Antigüedad del frío - 239 -

By this face of mine of yours
that you’ve forgotten
through this memory you call me
and it is not your mouth now but another
and they are not your lips but rather air
and you touch bottom until arriving at
the great question
here beneath this sky
without heritage without a soul
here upon this earth
without dreams without snow.

for S.

- 240 -
Has there been reason in all my disorders?
I wouldn’t know how to escape confusion
I tie myself to the steed that drags the impossible
while its boat evades the palm trees and the paths
of the crabs

I am the animal hurled at the dawn

beneath a sky that burns with the purest flames
the amphoras no longer hold back my blood
that solitary roof crowns my innocence
and
clean
my chassis marches on wheels
atop the flowers and the fantasies of this world.

Antigüedad del frío - 241 -

If I had no sight, hearing, olfactory sense
and no desire to stop at the principles of water
if I couldn’t bear the cold descending from another age
what clay pot could replicate my hardness
what bones would be needed to traverse my path
restless page that escapes from my hand
days of bloom before waking
and the root of my dream below my kidneys.

- 242 -
Located to the right
a memory is like a weed
it grows beneath the wind
does not honor its profound fate
and only a cold great struggle
allows its work to survive
among the snowfields
at the foot of the broom and brush
oh, that neutral pride, that
sudden and harmless sorrow
for the days that dance in
memory without
entering my head.

Antigüedad del frío - 243 -

I watch the temples at both sides of your head
giving shape to the flesh of the root
with the thin strength of a partition

the baroque animal or the tedious joke that you are

untangles its song among the vicissitudes
of a stalk that climbs toward the
high spheres of isolation
your body the shadow of other bodies
which lived to honor the challenge.

- 244 -
I concede to the fields these hours without violence
which the armistice provides
and return to the night all its misunderstandings

how the air flows without a single sound

how it unyokes from its high perfumes
how the immaculate steel enters
into the furnace
and survives its obligations

indecipherable, burnished country, in what direction

does my head turn

I make faithlessness my home.

Antigüedad del frío - 245 -

How to enter the light impatient pulsating wind
of the world
I’ve written about it already in a previous age
prolonging the aerial rotations of my holy music
other bonds I have not discovered
nor have I subjected to new consideration
that which seems to arouse doubt
among those who smile
here I am now with dark questions
fording the terrible years
(this attachment of yours to sacred words
it moves me).

- 246 -
How to find the tracks again
that led me to the undertow
remnants of ornaments I can no longer
tear myself away from
signs of other bones buried in the salt
but pride bends always
toward the left and disaster is subdued
before the toughness of its flesh

must I speak of the power

of a new sun to demonstrate
the abyss sleeps with its mouth gaping?

Antigüedad del frío - 247 -

No matter where I go
oh vicious disharmony
instead of the road I’ll only find its shell
I enter a different order at the bottom corner
of my chest
nothing divides me from my salve of pride
which reddens the gray hour
or the new desperation
I hold now by the shank.

- 248 -
What were those forests like
those meadows
witnesses of your first wonder
did not reach the age of the mountainside
nor that of the rivers which in their bed
carry their hidden bones
but you were headed toward excess
toward tragedy
toward the mystery of an unseeing world
among trees that do not speak
the coral the cedar tree
of your pain of water
and you had as many lives as the leaves.

Antigüedad del frío - 249 -

This is the source of my hostility
this trunk, these live coals, this gentle torch

by night I run the risk of internal order

I ask that the path beneath my feet spill

its treasures
I ask for water, absolute light

here is my wasted body

hope surrounds me
a rock
a winter
a seed of pure energy.

- 250 -
And the dead I must watch over
they the flayed dead
I have placed upon the scale
or gathered at the foot of a quiet wall
where at times they put down roots

never climbed up to my chest

nor laid bare their destiny
but they live hands fixed to the mud
with their broken bones
growing day after day
now they walk in the cold of their crutches
and in the memories they once furiously loved
and fall to their wounds
naked
bearing the pain of the earth.

Antigüedad del frío - 251 -

Through the image of those windows
you watch the words arrive
carrying sturdy armor
and speaking the truth with violence
they trap their hunger and their thirst
as if they fed from a well of gold
caught in the air by their already cold sound.

- 252 -
To write over the silence or over
its scraps of emptiness, but return to
words or toward their disappearance

return to clarity, to doubt,

to a simple life
or to the arduous ripeness of iron

away from here, to anchor in wonder

the innocence of the speechless.

Antigüedad del frío - 253 -

I give up what I’ve found
a feast of fire
or the cold that ambles toward its goal
all of the salt, my destinations all
strung together by the rugged wind
and the thousand vines extended
go rustling like a map
which now I offer with my hands open
to the open mouths that mark the days
with their water and their bread.

- 254 -
Nothing lies beyond this day
I’ve dedicated to memory
never anticipated but after the true illusion
whose movement takes form
in the forsaken earth
where I sink my feet
and I look above to the
emptiness of the snow.

Antigüedad del frío - 255 -

What other paths, what other nights
grow at my side in the same color?
The substance of the universe has passed
slowly through my hands
and established its own cruelty
but now I spill cold upon the stones
those alien stones
trying to bind myself to the shadow of smoke.

- 256 -
That this place never leave me, this courtyard
this blanket spread to call the horses
I surround the still landscape
its scent diffuses over the rustic objects
and the wheels broken to pieces
due to your intemperance
may it not abandon the visceral ivy either
piled up over the equestrian lands I walk
nor this prehistoric city which consumes
the anxiety of living on its knees.

Antigüedad del frío - 257 -

I move no further than rebellion

how to recover my toughness?

how to scatter these ruins of the heart
over the rooftops?

I limit my sustenance to a search

strike ceaselessly against the heavy door
and believe its sound to be sharp
without renouncing my furious horizon

all that remains is the undetectable wall

of my interior surveillance
and the path whose dust covers my bones.

- 258 -
I have no love for the predictable
no reaching out of the arms to feel the heart
the time that escapes from view
I wake up breathing yesterday’s air
I cross the black ravine
point out to you that which I do not see
no hands have ever existed save these
that gather the rocks
a desert in the darkness
a sightless flight in winter
a distant touch
all I hear is the light of the trees
the world is theirs
mine the desire for what’s next.

Antigüedad del frío - 259 -

At times I’m able to subdue the ancient darkness
that always overtakes me on the path
and search for a form of servitude
a definite threat
I hear the footsteps of fear
the anxiety of the wind
then with my motionless weeping
still damp
on the bare ocean surface of my love
I build a calm
and enter the ashes of the forests
the burning land
with my dense exhaustion.

- 260 -
In your mind which must be divided
and go the wrong way toward every destination
you’ve left a burn mark
soon you recognize the muck
the earth forgot
and it ferments now inside of your head

you can’t find it anywhere anymore

the blow struck in the distance
broken in two by silence
neither the water that retraces your steps
nor the sudden blooming of the day.

Antigüedad del frío - 261 -

I have no desire to remain in the cold
says the heart
but fog pushes the stone
or blocks its path
what number of bubbles break the surface
where the lost fruit flutters
I place my fingers on the memory
and allow the word to draw
its fragile silhouette.

- 262 -
On the page where your destiny is written
you will dip your finger
burning has entered into your house
and with the earth at the mountains’ side
rising up to the entrance of twilight
you’ll go unfurling
the pages of an unwritten poem
brought to ruin by the bareness of your senses
you’ll tear open a hole in the air
to bury the voices that shouldn’t have died
that are not silence either.

Antigüedad del frío - 263 -

What is the truth at the hour of the crowds?
a light that shimmers below ground
without managing to illuminate other times
fields of moss surround me still
the sound of bugles and cyclones
or the venomous insinuations that make
more difficult the use of the tongue
perhaps much later I’ll achieve
the perfect sacrifices and take
control of my dark badge I will surely
minus any mistakes establish the
proper contact and be my own self.

- 264 -
What walls can I rest my head against?

my memory no longer holds the image of that

shuttered house clinging to the abyss
the spoils torn from my dreams
I seize control of their grace now
no limit to the reach of my arms

what is silence to me, a close-fitting gag?

the unforeseeable is no easy prey

I face, as always, a new mask.

Antigüedad del frío - 265 -

In this earth that reaches up to my ears
where a single bird sings
in the midst of the light that blooms beneath a sudden snow
or in the dust without origin
I see the thought that forms in the water
traces of gold printed on the wind
time which never bears reason
and never reveals what it does
and topples my defenses.

- 266 -
 Beneath what drone does the night revolve?
in
the waking that continues beating against the eyes
in the tender ripeness of the peach, in the
black wall of the blank page
in the full unseeing sky
the night is an armistice of the day
destined to die
an event that’s lost by history
a resonant melody that boils slowly
that moves its lips to speak
of the beetle’s dark furrows.

Antigüedad del frío - 267 -

If the wind blows harder inside my head
if my song emanates from the rain of stones
if fists are what binds my hands
and I no longer recognize the fire falling from the sky
if I nourish my backbone with coals
and I push in a single direction
if I allow my feet to trod on their shadow
and the dust cries a living tear
and if the silence stills and the night opens
a dark wound in my side

fingers, I have watched you dream.

- 268 -
In the end all that’s left is this ragged shadow
to which I’ve been condemned
without pain and without complaint
where I knock on wood and mash my bread
and gather my scattered bones
there there
from where do I return with my piece of the wall.

Antigüedad del frío - 269 -

Where are we headed with these shadow wings
toward what goodwill or misfortune do we push the clay
bound to our destiny
and the threat that accompanies us
it has but a dark aroma
and so turns back into the smoothest foam
the slightest of scars
with a sharp bitterness an infuriated torment
with the secret fever that opens a path to my heart.

- 270 -
 Does the stone live inside you?
purely for sport it has entered
it suffers not being the earth which fills your mouth
or the warm ocean washing foam in your eyes
what horrific battle takes place within your blood
nevertheless it drags along in darkness
in the universe of possibilities
as if it drowned in the heart of its anguish
or lost its way banging its stubborn head.

Antigüedad del frío - 271 -

How long I’ve waited in crystal rooms
in the vast timber of the forests
watching the dark moon
along time that runs in a straight path
watching the quiet scent
of the vacant houses
in a hiding place filled with pain and tears
and I have waited up there in remembering
between pounded stones
above a drowned tree
in the midst of arid days.

- 272 -
In the eye of the great well
in that buried cistern
face turned toward the west
where the water dies each day
among metals that don’t know their splendor
here
surrounded by the space that penetrates the storm
listening to the voices of the shadow and the pain
where the wave wanders
what other tremor what other waters
reverberate dry and hungry
building
more deeply each time.

Antigüedad del frío - 273 -

Each trouble conditions me
but how to avoid it
how to close my eyes
and mind death no longer
that the abyss go asking for me
and every doorway where I touch earth
and I know nothing belongs to me
begin my story
and may it be a return to dust
made along dark threads.

- 274 -
How to imagine these rocks, these stones
I have carried upon my shoulders
from the place where fear descends
and breaks my ribs
how to crucify this miserable day
thin and very hungry
when my blood falls low as the sewers
and anxiety grows
amid the weariness.

Antigüedad del frío - 275 -

Perhaps the lushness of this foliage or its silence
no longer evokes
the helplessness of the leaves
their fragrance buried in the branches

perhaps my wild vision will set aflame the window

from which the burning enters
or I’ll distance myself from the flayed time
and remember the steps that hasten after the
forest
toward the failure of my desperation
over the enterprise which I call poetry.

- 276 -
I take this old poem entrusted to my breath, this
I take as if I inherited the treasures of a shipwreck; nothing
remains of it save a footprint of a tragedy, a sunken boat
escaping from itself like a ghost, of the luminous egg of
the bottom of the sea.

Antigüedad del frío - 277 -

I never left though I was always prepared to split
I’ve traveled the space of this clarity
and now I’m stopped by my desire
I penetrate that force whose secret is not imagined
and favors a profound journey.

- 278 -
I don’t desire a death in the middle of the bed
no
because nostalgia for another time, life itself,
marches resolutely within my blood
and might reveal memories
accumulated like harvests
I’m determined to bear the splinters
the growing obsession of another day
to traverse the only visible path
opening my eyes in the still midday.

Antigüedad del frío - 279 -

To write my poem
I follow your instructions from beyond the cold
and not for their wisdom or their magic
nor because they hide a treasure full of stones
not even for their emanations
or decorations that often turn to dust
all that is governed by the power of the wind
abandoned in my hands
willing only to make an entrance
or to practice and spin for eternity
upon the fallen field
of the empty page.

for Zeinab Abou el Hossen

- 280 -
HOW TO SURVIVE HOPE
AÚN NO (2004)
dedicated to Sara Rojas, poet
How will I be beneath this patch of crumbled
earth

if my feet hold me to the ground and the distance

grows red

the inaccessible horizon isn’t born from

indecision

one instant and I will lie no more

hardly do I wander from my place

in the land without windows, in the air

that moves around my ankles

this evening the walls of my house appear

made of air, they’re separated by the peace
imposed by the heat.

the darkness there has dried itself.

- 284 -
The blow that prolongs its sound

in the weaving of the paths

oh hidden splendor

mists that reveal all

predators by light in the arid land

pools that won’t go easily

late sunlit naked shipwrecks

heavenless rocks

a place at rest with its back to the night.

Aún no - 285 -
What violence in these clouds of smoke
cramped together they advance
subdued
barefoot

to forget the perspective of inflamed desire

the permanence of the flame that’s held

they are the tools of a destroyed memory

pushed toward the harsh dust
pushed by love toward the fire
so the ashes may be satisfied

if the shutter will not return

if the heat expels us from the dawn.

- 286 -
How to walk toward the morning light’s turbulence
without abolishing sadness

my house without quarrels traversed at times by

a vastness
a house that descends until reaching nearly
the horror of joy

a house occupied by self-confidence

by the color of its movements
in the dust that keeps it alert

arisen from a seething reality

with walls that are instant, fragile, stone after

stone puts itself together at the heart of the ash.

Aún no - 287 -
This is the time to join the offering
of the mountaintop
this night carved in flint

through fire, in the rocky expanse

of the day,
I know how to survive hope

while I accept the inexorable, with a gust

of the frontier wind and in cruel space,
I walk among the despair that surrounds my floor

with hands out as if I cannot see I embrace this late hour.

- 288 -
To rest my head in my hands
in the deepened night

dig around in the necessity

sink my bones in the cold earth

touch new depths in the low season

newly do I open my eyes to receive light

an image of the moon
and the wisdom of its ashes

all around me falls the black air

I await the demands of the rain at the

bottom of the sea
with the snow like a lost page
or the wind within its prison
stoking the heat.

Aún no - 289 -
Who will return the night its powers
first hand

who will build their abysses in the cold room

their sunrises destroyed

their sundowns without flame

the lamp is introduced between two tolls

of the bell
the lamp is extinguished with the day
darkness begins on a mountainside

that night without summer, without rooftops, without

stone
moves now in dreams of the sun.

- 290 -
What does the echo mean
that its magnificence visits the night

this echo traverses the gold and keeps it on foot

the echo ends up at the end of the wall

where no air can enter

how to walk in the direction of the earth?

how to calm the pain of the forests?

an unthinkable action for the abyss

there the echo rends itself apart under the storm

every bit of echo carried by the flame

the echo in decline

the night held in place by lightning.

Aún no - 291 -
I have attributed to swamps
the solitude of bridges

the solitude
the dry and scalding clay
the water held in suspense
the reeds that stand over the wreckage

there is an instant in which my movements

cast a shadow
under the ceaseless twilight

so I invent tranquility
I invent touch
I make the earth slow its step.

- 292 -
A roof that rises to my forehead
a vault where the wind comes to a halt

in the dry emptiness of the air

this instant begins further past

begins in the rocks
sets off toward the thawing of the moon
gives up its breathing

like the window before an afternoon that sizzles

like the cold that tries to detain a memory

like the water pouring through the weeds.

Aún no - 293 -
How to replace the walls of my prison
buried and still upright?

how to oppose destiny and reject its

fruits?

no guest had yet surprised me with their mystery

I have taken for myself the ripeness of peaches

its lure I have buried among my bones

I face the rampart of the blank page

I face the rancor of the knife and its prey

its hostility crushes the heart

this is my path toward the dark impiety

these dry words abandoned by the smoke.

- 294 -
Perhaps this face of yours, that I should retrace,
will remain etched in stone

fruits lie there in devastation

collapsed movements
a cool throat

and the outburst of goodbyes under the graceless sky

that our tears, farewells, break the stems of the sugarcane

navigating through subterranean paths, the wind

pushing us as if we were its masterpiece.

Aún no - 295 -
This is the stream
its great sheets of rock
colorless

this is the warmth when my hand is open

closed
my dry fist
a calloused river

I try to liberate the deadened landscape

the promised stream trembles in the mouth

of a fish

with the transparency of the fountains

and the unfamiliar breath of the pasture

stones illuminated without nostalgia of the infinite.

- 296 -
This is my past
there is only myth within it

the earth pushes me toward exhaustion

an evil unknown to its wisdom pushes me

I wall myself behind my drunkenness

I invoke the devotion of clay

I enter the density of the mountain

the mountain you climbed
naked
I return to the paper
its shuddering whiteness

whiteness erases itself

I know the silhouette of whiteness.

Aún no - 297 -
I hear the sound of this door

with my warm hands

I examine the wood

there’s a lost treasure within its crevices

I make ready the escape

all the camp is before the walls
like a cold dry summer
with the same vigor of the fire

I’ve expelled all the air from my journey

I’ve reinforced the bank

the path illuminates me to waking

a path that doesn’t reach the horizon

has been removed from my footsteps.

- 298 -
If the earth exists
it is to establish
the distance of the stars

it becomes necessary to move adversely

against the undertow

this future doesn’t respond to your call

it is an unsettling whisper
an emptiness attached to the wall

I hold the tree to its thoughts

this land that ignites with the rocks

this land you could not foresee

I search for other trampled wounds

I concede to the wind a body without memory.

Aún no - 299 -
 I’m not staying here
I don’t exist there in the crowd
I am the threshold

this threshold detains me

the only one of us that sleeps

among the rocks

this condescending country

in the country where applause does not exist

neither does the dawn rebuke us

nor cross its arms

I see the sky bowed before the horseshoe

it is a lost dream
a nightfall pressed against my forehead.

- 300 -
To erase the summer
to place the future into question

here’s the way the wind is tied to stone

I lift these ruins with the tips of my fingers

I silence the sea

defy the mystery of the water
I open furrows in the clarity
I place the forests in a straight line

to the heat that surrounds my fist I give

the same thought as to twilight.

Aún no - 301 -
To never be alone in the heart of the ashes

in the day that opens onto our steps

upon the earth we lack the skill

it’s essential to move forward as we disappear

like the hummingbird, the grass doesn’t envy

nor meditate

we only just sowed the summer in the earth’s rind

with the impatience of the forests

trees that don’t know how to walk

with a night that drags on

over the stony surface of the moon.

- 302 -
To feel the taste of the sea in my mouth

to traverse half the day

or return to its origin

I’ve walked upon peaks of silence

clarity has escaped me
I stumble amid the light
clarity tangles itself about my ankles

I enter the depths of the night’s cunning

easily do I give myself over to its spell

I push against this foot

I tear my foot from the black earth

only retaining hope in the distance

I build countless stones out of

my hope.

Aún no - 303 -
That the clairvoyance of smoke be given to me

it is impossible here
to forget the emotion of stones

it’s from the perceptiveness of the evenings

before my rustic heart
that my back doubles sweetly to the fate
of all our farewells

deep as the sun enters into the heart

of a rock

with words that celebrate without violence

the tracks of horseshoes
in the dampened dust of the moon.

- 304 -
The air has broken from its roots
that captive air

in the anonymous hours whose duration

unravels in the storm

there are weaknesses that conserve their fruit

or they survive beneath the downpours

where the dark earth turns its back

to the pebbles

with the messages the bay cedar brings

and the debris it locks inside its imagination
the seed
silence liberates itself from the page

that secret and ageless world only promises

our despair.

Aún no - 305 -
For the ground on which I don’t set foot
for the silences and gifts of the forgotten day
for the ear that only hears the stones roll by
for the air swept clear full of light
for the sedentary horizon we cannot trespass

for the time of joy lost and full

separated from the constellations
and the wind I retain in my heart
caught between walls

in the absent bed a ceaseless spasm

an obstinate pleasure
a vigil above the nape of my neck.

- 306 -
The cyclopean time shrouded in red
occurrences
has seen grow in the distance the harshness
of the climate

only my windows open ceaselessly

under the shadow of night
in the irreparable fire

and the flash of the plunder

swirling among its ashes

who protests, who diverts from their

certainties
who has not sensed the coming end
or projects it against the cleared midday

the time without surrender follows its own path.

Aún no - 307 -
How to embrace this grief
the stricken earth
the hammer that smites the day

one must press firmly against the vertebrae

to introduce a dream inside the bones

in this resurrected time

with a sky that is our enemy

now my hands of dirt have torn away

the message

if the day weakens, the promise loses its

way

shadow of the day happy and intact

a world chewed away at
cramped and overripe.

- 308 -
At last I see the forests of my youth guarding
my armory with a bitter zeal

into that depression I deposit the revived fruits

of my farewells

a barrenness that flees

an inheritance without a touch of madness
upon the evasive expanse

with my hands I capture the fear

I cut away steps on the inaccessible day

those shutters open toward the blinding tree

I sense how the space grows without slowing

its march

the wind will return to me the lost wall.

Aún no - 309 -
What to do before the slumbering tree
or before the window
now limited by the footprint of the day

the tree still tries to dream of another destiny

in the sound docile to vengeance

within the hybrid air
over the stone broken more each time
and tapered

all that remains is setting the wind to the flame

to sleep under the shadow of the earth
or push the day toward its silence.

- 310 -
I watch the ruins of this city with no future

I choose the fantastic stones

animated by the gift of their appearance

I find no adversaries for the silence

it’s prolonged in the stupor of the drought

I open a path in this desert polished by the breeze

atop the parched figure of the sand I love

the bitter channel defies my recklessness

the air we venerate beneath the white horizon

has returned to illuminate us with its spell

this vision of the ruins alone flows from my fist.

Aún no - 311 -
The late fleeting light of our desperation

here are its waters, resurgent, made greater,

the steps that return to their source

here, also, the gallop of my footprints

the opposite side of the flame
the fragments of the forest

the fatigue of the wood where I rest my bones

the warmth that’s born at dawn, the shivering dew

follows at my heels.

- 312 -
If I rest a shoulder against the sea

where do the shooting stars come to rest?

I’m brought back to the cruelty at the end of this day

I return to vengeance for the withered path

over the desert that extends itself on my hand

that I cannot replace, that traverses the
bedroom or surrenders itself to servitude

in the middle of that well of sand I was shaken

with the creeping slowness of insomnia

and silence that has hardened
the anguish bends to meet my face

I take up the tool of unhappiness

and open the doors to my prison.

Aún no - 313 -
REFLECTIONS
ARISTILDE KIRBY
For ‘Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph’
translation & transfiguration of mosaic disorder

“The identity of words—the simple, fundamental fact of language, that

there are fewer terms of designation then there are things to designate—
is itself a two-sided experience: it reveals words as the unexpected meet-
ing place of the most distant figures of reality.”

— Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth

What would happen if Ariadne took the reins of her destiny

into her own hands, against the Moirae, to determine a life
winded by her own designs? There are 189 poems in Esdras
Parra’s Esto suelo secreto (1992 - 1993). In my estimation, this
book is a reply to that question, not an answer, which risks to-
talizing, but an elaboration; for a question offers a quest, and a
reply seeks resolution of said quest.

I know a trans woman who decided at 16 to buy hormones

from an online pharmacy and change her life forever, in the
shadow of disapproving parents. When I think about replies,
about Ariadne after Theseus left her on an island, something
like this comes to mind. The question of your life seems drawn,

Reflections -317-
measured & cut before hand, but to take your own authority in
the textile weaving we know as writing is necessary, universally.
Why throw up your hands and say “story of my life?”
Why not make yours, a way out?

“(It is distance abolished; at the form of contact, differences are brought

together in a unique form: dual, ambiguous, Minotaur-like.) It demon-
strates the duality of language which starts from a simple core, divides
itself in two and produces new figures.”

— Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth

There are 189 poems in Esto suelo secreto. Jamie Berrout did a
superb job translating all of them to the English. I remember
she told me that she would be interested in seeing what my
owntranslations of Parra’s work would look like which is, in a
sense, why I’m here. I was uninterested. What I didn’t want was
for people to look back 10 years down the line and compare
them, placing us, unintentionally into competition. Which is
wrong and totally undesirable.
But anyway, I feel like there is a kind of desire for a neutral-
ity between translations in a body of work, and I can point to
many instances where many lay side by side in harmony, where
each strikes a new chord from the original another translation
doesn’t: see Margaret Sayers Pedro’s essay on Sor Juana, but
when it comes to texts of import like The Divine Comedy and
extolled writers like Dante, people have their preferences. And
because of the semantic polyvalence of ornate styles of poetry,
or how ancient the language can be, people pick favorites. Par-
ra’s poetry here is not gongorismo , though. And it was written
in the 90s.
And my favorite is Jamie’s! She was the right person to do
it in every way. She created a perfect double in English that is

-318-
just about level with Parra’s original. I honestly don’t know how
anyone can do a better job than her, just a different job than
her. And with that said, I echo her desire for Parra’s translations
to extend, far past the anglosphere. That’s another way to ob-
tain harmony. She deserves that. But I know there’s nothing I
can do in regards to English translation. I’m not really inter-
ested in being referred to as Parra’s bad translator via making a
concerted effort to make my renditions different from Jamie’s
when it simply isn’t necessary. Or just changing a word here
and there and being barely different at all, where you begin to
question why I even did it in the first place.
Parra’s writing, while hermetic, mystic, alchemical, ensor-
celling, is written in quite simply. The clearness of the language
is contrasted against the obscurity of what she’s saying across
ESS as a book. With Parra, it’s not a question of how she wrote
her books in terms of method, but trying to articulate why she
wrote them in this way, in an existential sense.

“(It’s a proliferation of distance, a void created in the wake of the dou-

ble, a labyrinthine extension of corridors which seem similar and yet are
different.)”

— Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth

So I’ll tell you what I can do, what I’m interested in doing,
which is not at all out of sorts with anything you may have seen
me do before. There are 189 poems in Esdras Parra’s Esto suelo
secreto. And like an album, I’ve rearranged the order in which
the poems have appeared. Why? Because the order in which
things appear matters, and though it might seem arbitrary, se-
quencing creates order, chronologically, thematically, spatially.
It determines what you start and end with, how you get there.
Why? Because

Reflections -319-
“In their wealth of poverty words always refer away from and lead back
to themselves; they are lost and found again; they fix a vanishing point
on the horizon by repeated division, then return to the starting point in
a perfect curve.”

— Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth

Things should hold up no matter what order they’re in. On

top of that, a new order can change your perspective on central
themes or illuminate new ways of reading a poem you may not
have considered. I’m interested in a changeability that isn’t su-
perficial, but deep-seated in the fascia of The Work that creates
a form of itself outside the self you’ve been presented with.
There are 189 poems in Esdras Parra’s Esto suelo secreto. But
I’ve only given you 14 of that reorder, and I’ve written my own
correspondence to those 14. Maybe my full interpretation will
see the light of day one day. But for now, this should suffice.
Why? Because I believe in an engagement with literary works
apart from the tried and true essay form. Because I grew tired of
essays in undergrad, a form we spend our entire stints learning
and refining. Because I think we can find a more intra, inter,
and infra way of navigating The Work. I was the girl who more
often than not chose the ‘creative prompt’ of an assignment. I
was the girl who more often than not wrote about a text I was
interested that had nothing to do with the curriculum, rather
than the one we were given.
This means of mine has extended to the way I write, peri-
od. The Works I choose to engage with are chosen with firstly, a
deep appreciation for The Work that’s entangled in my person-
al history. Secondly, I engage with works that are already con-
sidered to be in some way ‘experimental,’ because, as I said, I
believe that while a simple essay can do a job, it’s more fun and

-320-
true to the nature of The Work to explore it in ways beyond the
standard. Because the work is abnormal as it is. Third, if I don’t
think I can bring a perspective or means to the work that’s to-
tally original to Aristilde Kirby, The Girl From Grand Avenue,
then it never happens. Just check what I’ve done:

1. Opaline Y Hyalite | A staging of symbols derived from

early Japanese modernist Chika Sagawa in a sonic song
play, created by me, that is a synthesis of three poems
translated by Sawako Nakayasu, made from commons
samples on Freesound.com manipulated by my own
sound design hardware and software.

2. Strawberry Resirper / Achene Returner | For whatev-

er reason, the Vetch team appreciated my engagement
with outside material as a way to generate work and they
wanted more that pushed this further. I had a few other
poems, and then I had the Resirper, which I thought was
the least likely to be published due to its size. The poem
uses selections from Esto suelo secreto, a book I genuinely
appreciate, to form a substantial part of its symbology
& formalism. It’s my words that give a new context to
Parra’s, and the other found materials, not the other way
around.

3. SI no.3 / MG no.8 | In a sense, a logical conclusion

to 2 in a lot of ways. I was working on a book called
Bitacora Total Bust, that was going to be the construc-
tion of a body through different formalisms. This idea
has been abandoned. Any reference to me thinking of
this as a motherboard is rooted in the original function of
this as part of a brain chip set. Fragments of the SI / MG

Reflections -321-
 were rejected when I submitted them for publishing in a
few places, and I realized that they don’t make sense in
isolation, that I needed to complete my transfiguration of
Isou’s letterism as a whole. Anyway, I’ve had an interest in
the situationists and later lettrisme since I first heard The
Shape of Punk to Come in middle school.

I need people to know, more than anything else, that I don’t go

around reading, licking my chops ravenously thinking about
how I can ruin people’s hard work, that I’m some craven mug-
ger, that I can’t or am unwilling to play a simple role that I
chose to play if I kindly decide to lend my time to helping you
out, that I am unilaterally determined on impressing myself
upon everything I lay eyes on.
Please don’t disrespect everything I am about.
My point of view is a mark I make on the world, and I
don’t have pencils for fingers. It’s a long, involved process that
makes more sense the more I work on it. A lot of time I don’t
think anything like this about anything. Sometimes if I have a
fleeting idea, I forget it.
I’m well acquainted to being a bit player. I know when to
leave well enough alone. All my translations were practices at
getting better with a language I’ve always cared about but grew
up on the outside of, with authors that I deeply respect and
care for, with works that I’m a superfan of that no one picked
up to translate, to enrich my own appreciation. My transla-
tions, and a large amount of my work have gone unpublished,
and I’m fine with that. Because it was for me first. Because I
spend my life working for other people. My writing will always
be for me first.
I’m not interested in taking anything from you, especially
not anything you’re not already willing to give, and I would like

-322-
to think that time and again that I’ve proved my own ability as
an exceptional writer, no matter the derivation, that through it
all, be it through my own designs, or past circumstances that I
have virtually no control over, that I’ve made certain of my own
originality, which I have pride in more than anything else. Po-
etic forms are public property, they’re beyond anyone’s singular
permutation of it, that’s the idea. There’s Shakespeare, there’s
Petrarch, there’s Isou. Then there’s everyone else.
I know for a fact no one would have used this random
letterist sonnet as a visual score for their own work before I did
it. Because literally no one did. I am a singular force and vessel
for inspiration & creativity on this planet, replicable, but never
duplicable.
So is Esdras Parra. And so are you.
When I had first read Esto suelo secreto, I had figured it was
about making peace with life and death in equal proportions.
But then again, what something is about specifically is a pecu-
liar word to judge a text around, and around is just what the
essence of about is, a surface level description that captures a
brief symmetry of the work as a whole: in every direction, on
every side, and for circles and spheres there exist, at least head
on, one side curved continuously by one line as it makes its
about faces through time. Esto suelo secreto is about an internal
world eclipsed by the surface of a person, a node of subjectivity
immersed in the most caliginous reaches of the self. The nou-
mena of oneself turned inside out reveals emotional landscapes
set atop the seasons. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence the span of
the works range in one year’s difference. Those landscapes are
expressed through life and death as arbitrary forces that also
make of each other contrapositives: anti-life, anti-death -- im-
mortality intermixed with total non-existence and the trace
that makes these states even perceptible.

Reflections -323-
 They converge upon the node of one self as the book chron-
icles the journeys of a facet of that being, persevering somehow
in the harshest conditions in their own distinct times and con-
comitant spaces, yet moving together, be they via a matter of
terrain or upon the heart, through memory, in existence. It is
a book about ritual, about self-sacrifice, about undoing, about
renewal. It is personally impersonal, stretching toward a feeling
of universality, of absoluteness.
Honestly, if you want to get a good idea about what ESS
means to the author, it would be wise to check out the Au-
torretrato (Self-Portrait) essay that Berrout packaged with her
translation, just behind the last poem. Perhaps it’s all the way
back there, so as not to give anything away immediately, to give
away the enigmatic nature of the book that preceded it. In my
eyes, ESS is a pointillist, kind of multi-dimensional exercise in
self-portraiture, a fantastic, yet life-like mosaic, once again, a
fragmented chronicle of a journey -- or a peregrinage, as I call
it.. A rationale for the book can be derived from the Autorre-
trato, from the subtext of the “journey” that is “long and tor-
turous, arduous and difficult,” of mystery or enigma invoked
in the book that, five years later seems to accept that she “will
never unravel no matter how much I struggle.”
How she sees herself as a person on the way out of life
itself, fragmented and terraformed subconsciously by discrete
memories, which match how each poem in the book is pre-
sented: “I see myself, then, in the center of many countless
scenes, as if they were projected against a screen, in [Caracas],
where most of my life has taken place, and in other cities, dis-
tant and beautiful in different times and situations. And in the
town where I was born, in the mountains of the Andes, where
I spent my childhood and most of my adolescence, to which I
return wherever I can. The sap of those landscapes, a bit wild,

-324-
circulates through my veins…I am, somehow, those climates.”
Stuff about the nature of her occupation as a poet, the ob-
scurity of aspects of her work, and even who the book seems
to be, to an extent, addressed to with the constant invocations
of tu : “My words, like that weapon that returns to its point of
origin after being thrown, are addressed to my own ears. I am
the partner in my conversation. I write to and for myself. For
what is inconclusive, undetermined, and halfway done within
me, because that’s what is in the depths of my consciousness.”
Or even something about what the purpose of the book
is: “I’ve circled unceasingly around myself searching for a non-
existent center, with the disposition of my will set on hoping
to find it. I’ve come a long way thanks to my luck, or at least
that’s what I think. If luck remains with me, I’ll advance a
little further, perhaps with time enough, to leave a record of
this incredible journey, that this can explain itself by means
of thought and action. Or perhaps, what would be ideal, to
maintain silence.”
She covers all three bases at once. Esto suelo secreto. ‘This
secret land, still without use of reason.’ Esto, or this, a neu-
tral-form that roots back to the Latin ipse (‘himself, herself,
itself, the very-, the actual-’), suelo, a word you can surely trans-
late to land, or earth, ground, soil, or the interesting, yet con-
ceptually dissonant (though not necessarily wrong) floor.
Floor is interesting insofar as I wouldn’t choose that over
the other words for anything official, for they allude more to
the plot and themes of the book’s narrative in a more conso-
nant way. Floor seems to be the furthest thing from correct
on the surface of all possibilities, it tastes more artificial than
the natural former words -- but it reveals an errant possibili-
ty, like a secret compartment under the floorboard of a house
(an important touchstone of Parra’s figures in these poems as a

Reflections -325-
whole), or a wooden hideout beneath the forest floor that hides
a secret path elsewhere. We’ll get back to that in a bit. Let’s take
a detour.
The first track, Albayalde, on Marina Fages’ Dibujo de
Rayo / Trace of Bolt (2015) has an interesting parallel with the
last song Casas de Viento / Houses of Wind in the context of
the album. Albayalde, as you can see from the citation, is all
about a protagonist who marvels at the powerful imagery of
the storm as a backdrop, who sees the clouds clustered against
the southern sky and is given illumination when the lightning
sparks—the backdrop looks like a wall, and the traces of bolt as
the vines of chipping rifts of lead paint: albayalde. Albayalde is
derived from the arabic al-bayūd, denoting blancura, or white-
ness—or I’d rather blankness, to sidestep any easy, distasteful,
misguided connotations.
The word retrato was borrowed from the Italian ritratto.
As the dictionary says, it’s a noun for a portrait, image, de-
piction—but it’s also an adjective: portrayed, drawn, depicted,
and even more interestingly: drawn back, withdrawn.
The thing about achieving harmony in translation is that
there’s a balance in consonance and dissonance, and it matches
the ratio given in its origin. Pick a certain word and depending
on who reads it, things come across differently than intended,
throwing off the composition. You could just say Lightning Bolt
instead of Trace of Bolt. I feel like most people would go with
the former over the latter, but I also feel like people don’t see
the art in the phrase Dibujo de Rayo, that they don’t even see
the green MS-Painted bolt drawn on the album cover, they just
see an easy answer. It’s not even pronounced Dibujo de Rye-oh,
Fages says Dibujo de Rassho, as is customary in Argentina and
Uruguay, with a sh or zh sound that, if you ask me, has a little
of the static friction of electricity. In translation one can take

-326-
a lot of things for granted, and like the meanings of words we
hold dear to us in our first language, a lot of assumptions are
made, which is why language has any staying power at all.
But when we talk about models of accuracy, of the analog,
the perfect replica, it’s more apropos when applicable to take
the same risk the original phrase or word does, and go a bit
further than what we are conditioned to expect. Dissonance
to achieve balance is key where applicable. Words can be static
pointers, or they can be flowing true nodes for all the current
energies that power what we are and do.
Albayalde comes to us as more than a simple loanword,
it’s morphed by Spanish itself. Azul and many other words
taken for granted were formed similarly, but albayalde is less
piecemeal. How can you replace that with White lead and
be content with your decision here? Sure, for a can of paint,
go for it. But, rarely in translation, there are those necessary
times where somethings have to just be let be, where doing
nothing is a powerful, apropos move. Albayalde is what it is,
a translation-in-itself of the original arabic -- the word retains
the essential element of its mystery while playing a traveled,
experienced, shifted form of its sound reflected in the word’s
very writing.
It’s an interesting result, even if it is, in a sense, an error, a
wandering into a new context and gaining validity on its own
circulation in a new culture. Titular and titular are spelled the
same in English and Spanish, but are said in ways endemic
to speech in those given languages. Albayalde isn’t quite the
standard Spanish word. Because it’s not it hints at the histories
between North African arab cultures and Spain, which were
once more closely mingled, in enmity most famously, anoth-
er facet in the geode of Africa and Europe geopolitically. But
the word’s existence intimates of a possibility, at least to me,

Reflections -327-
of something else. The stranger that belongs. It shouldn’t be
ordinary anywhere else. Casas de Viento is a song where the
speaker and their group has, as in Albayalde, gone down the
path of vanished bolts to observe the color of the wall more
closely, and to see said bolts again. The storm having settled,
she observes, now, the clouds as houses of wind, as sandcastles,
exist: beautiful structures of irregular permanence, even as they
disappear, travel, take new forms. The speaker is the comet’s
ambit to come, and yet the path before brailles as a result of the
tail. Her star follows her travels that decide the future trajecto-
ry: “ser movimiento y en el viaje, el agite.”
To draw is accepted as the analog for dibujar, while trazar
would be accepted as the analog for trace, yet we view the traces
of the speaker’s paths drawn upon the plural right now (sec-
ond by second) as she continues at a flash similar to lightspeed
somewhere else. She must be movement, immersed in her voy-
age, the restless stir for self-progression that fuels her. On the
way, she undergoes many trials, and skirts close to destruction
in some instances. We hate cliches for being too familiar, but
the darkest nights of the soul always happen before the dawns
of renewal.
Albayalde even, through no real effort of its own, the word
alba inside of it, which connotes the dawn, the morning. Which
brings us back to Esto suelo secreto / To be human once more. Ja-
mie Berrout’s rendition of Parra’s title gives us the original title
in its original language, but branches off of it with the final line
from the book’s very first poem [Si la voluntad te elige como
potro]. The titles written in the original Spanish composed of
the first line of every originally untitled poem are an executive
move that recall of the modern publishers of Emily Dickinson:
to add a title to aid in discussion of the works or for indexical
purposes.

-328-
 It’s a useful standard to set. Translators are responsible for
more than just the essential word changes to achieve harmony
with the source text, but they have a structural calling too, es-
pecially if a given author is new to certain linguistic spheres,
they must also bring forth the context this writer existed in
their own time and space, a semiotician of the mark they made
upon the world, carrying the torch of their chosen writer’s
light, a trace behind their steps, for me to read a reconstruction
of a burnt map for its blank paths. A map that had to be rec-
ollected for it had been scattered by the wind, liminal between
this world and the next.
To present To be human once more as a subtitle is not a faux
pas, it’s a recognition on the part of Berrout of her role: To
humanize the poet above all. Esto suelo secreto is very much a
construction of personal myth, but Berrout and everyone that
comes across Esdras Parra owe it to themselves to not see her
fall behind the thick wall of literary obscurity, or even so much
the parameters of her own work, or behind what is effectively,
what people posit to be an essential unknowability of the self
at the core, of what Parra might say would be her enigma, but
to learn of what her existence signifies in a world like this. The
quality of my life has improved with the exemplary care Ber-
rout has taken to have her shine on her own terms outside the
bounds of her timeline and lifespan. To be human once more is
what happens when the vestiges of great embers are rekindled,
animated by a tender breath.
It is a book as a cross section of a tree, you can study the
story of its rings. It is also a book one can read by the very fire
that lights it, especially when it becomes consumed by that
fire. It’s a book of ash, a burned picture that chars characteris-
tics and fine details that can only be reconstructed through the
edges of its darkness, the fringes of abyss soaking through the

Reflections -329-
colors.
When Jamie gave me her scan of ESS as a PDF, I saw the
epigraphs for the first time. The epigraphs in particular deploy
an essential context in which each successive poem draws from
and characterize the style of the book as a whole: “Penetra sor-
damente en el reino de las palabras” or ‘Silently penetrate the
realm of words’ from Carlos Drummond de Andrade from
Brazil. Drummond de Andrade was known as a modernist
through and through, characterized by a rejection of the aca-
demic, European, objective, nationalistic, realistic for the quo-
tidian, local, mythic, subjective, existential, metaphysical. An
embracing of free verse and a break from normal syntax also
defined its style. He is known for a Seven Faces, a poem known
as a cornerstone of modernism in his home country. “Mi sueño
es duro y dura, porque ha sufrido el templo de la dura realidad”
or ‘My dream is hard and harsh, because it has suffered the
temples of a severe reality’ by Pierre Reverdy, known to many
as a cubist, a proto-surrealist. Kenneth Rexroth, in an intro-
duction to his translations of Reverdy said: “Poetry such as this
attempts not just a new syntax of the word. Its revolution is
aimed at the syntax of the mind itself.”
And lastly, there is a citation from Octavio Paz: “Todo el
poema se cumple a expensas del poeta” or ‘An entire poem
forms itself at the poet’s expense.” In a book about Paz’ poet-
ics, from a chapter called “The Nature Myth” by Jason Wilson,
there’s a passage that I think befits Parra’s work in ESS pretty
well:

“Thus the poem is emblematic of paradise, an organic echo-system of

analogies, a self-sufficient cosmos. The poem defies rectilinear time,
for it can be read repeatedly. The poem ushers in ‘absolute’ or mythic
time by recreating the original moment of creation and redeeming the
moment. The poem is an ‘electric zone’, alchemically transmuting flux,

-330-
embodying Breton’s alchimie mentale. Poetry is thus knowledge, vision,
and reconciliation it says the unsayable and reminds the human of one’s
true nature by crystallizing desire. The poem is the poet’s tomb, where
one loses the ego to gain one’s self, and where the liberated language
creates the poet.”

We now have a literary context to, in a sense, to detect by

what means the book came to exist as it is, why it’s written
that way. Judging by the epigraphs we have a sense of mod-
ernist creacionismo, a sort of surrealism that experiments with
time, space, structure threaded through needle’s eye of one’s
subjectivity, a book made by the total conviction to a poet’s
sentence paths to obtain one’s own freedom. It is a book of
process, not so much a pilgrimage or peregrinage but a para-
grimage, or paragrimagen. It reminds me of Magritte’s Not To
Be Reproduced or Time Transfixed in terms of perspective. I’m
reminded of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge who forms her poetic line
in deference to the horizon, which has an effect on the shape
of the book itself, going more towards a landscape orientation
than a portrait one.
At the outer reaches of retrato, suelo, and albayalde, three
keywords we’ve managed to find a nameless path that’s lead us
here, by the door in the floorboards, toward the unconscious
substratum warped by dreams and memory that is ESS as a
book. Do you remember when Dante and Vergil went to Hell,
and the message they read as they prepared to go through the
entrance of the portal? “Before me things create were none,
save things Eternal, and eternal I endure.”
So, what’s my angle? The purpose of this section was to give
you a sense, an abstract, of what ESS is, establish translation
as a lens through which to view it, as a process of choices, a
compendium of alternates, to give a deeper context by which
the work can be analyzed. Because honestly, in all my years,

Reflections -331-
I’ve never read a book of poetry like Esto suelo secreto. Without
the epigraphs, I had to take the poem word by word, page by
page, the Autoretrato didn’t come until the end of Berrout’s first
edition. If I didn’t have that, I’d have less to go on.
Certain words, lines, poems began to mean more to me,
but the more I read the book as it was presented, the more
it made sense. Those certain repeated words became themes
and created a continuity throughout the fragmented book, the
overarching narrative events seemingly out of order provoked
thought, the disorder became a theme that drove points home
in their own jagged ways. The enigmatic book attracted my
attention more and more with the aura of not a simple riddle,
or a puzzle where everything neatly fits, but more so a sphinx’s
adivinanza. So you can consider the following the beginning of
a bigger response to that. The tip of an iceberg.
I believe Parra wrote and presented the poems to be the
way they are: fragmented, disordered, obscure yet unified, bril-
liantly direct and indirect at certain points. My interest is in
fielding a theory of overtonal harmonics that extends to the
task of translation, back to the fundamental process of read-
ing. To really find what I take away from this book, to share
with you. The translators create proportional expanded partials
from the fundamental language, hovering about the original
and creating a fuller, lusher sound, the reaches of some partials
expanding into different ranges of hearing that other beings
may not have, while others do.
The purpose is to study, to recreate. I think of a stained
glass window broken by a blast of sound when I consider ESS
as a book, and I am trying to repair what was originally an en-
tire picture via organizing by edge and grouping by colors The
goal is to organize the book’s order around the keywords we see
repeat, as well as the temporality of given poem’s events to gain

-332-
a near-complete chronology of the journey, the paragrimage.
But I only have one piece of the image for now, a bit of
corner at the most. The gap between the shards acts as a thread
that doesn’t perforate or pierce the pieces to stitch, but as rivers
of air sealing the riven by the paste of explication and intima-
tion. The idea is to show you how Parra’s poems work.
Finally, in Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s “Búsqueda a la
poesia,” from which the epigraph was taken, there’s a passage
that goes: “Acércate más y contempla las palabras. / Cada una
/ tiene mil rostros secretos bajo la faz neutra / y te pregunta, sin
interés por la respuesta, / pobre o terrible, que pudieras darle: /
¿Trajiste la llave? | Bring yourself closer and contemplate the
words. / Each one / has a thousand faces beneath its neutral
mien / and it asks you, sans interest in your response, / poor
or terrible, that you can dare give it: / Did you bring the key?”
I didn’t bring a key. I made a makeshift legend, of course.
Going to every book and expecting to simply unlock it is not
an optimal way to read or conceive of the art as a whole. For
more, I guess, avant-garde leaning works the best thing you can
do is to explore what they have to offer, map the surroundings,
and have fun along the way. Esdras Parra’s work in ESS goes
against a lot of what Andrade’s poem dictates, the epigraph be-
ing an exception among a few. Parra doesn’t compromise any-
thing in ascertaining her poetics, and nor should you.
Ariadne’s fate varies wildly depending on the culture, what
it values, when it happens. If she’s at the center of her making,
no one else can thread her along, cut her off, or cut her away.
Her lifeline is of her own design. Abandoned on the island,
she’s left with an empty spool as despair looms. What do you
do?

Reflections -333-
-334-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | I
[en tu recuerdo nace el bosque & parasol]

I was born in the forest, if I

recall correctly. If I do,
I was nude, & the leaves of
the trees hid not this but
...something...from me.

[a terrarium nestled within a hum

parsed through the hearthen
clasp of a chemical stopbath]

In your memory the forest is born In autumn, they

the forest and your memory pick themselves, but there
are born within you we aren’t.
take away the lips of the forest
and you’ll see death face to face [the pall of a reversed wand opens
though you are no tree its amber parasol & parks
still you are born in the forest. along a geode breast of forest]

There I was, beneath

gelatin film of a darkroom
morning. A light sip glints
sea salt crystals, internal,
inherent nth sparklaces.

Reflections -335-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | II
[levantaté & memento moiré

Stand up What it hid was the membrane

the walls of your dreams of generated golden means between
won’t cede their infinite depth me & the selves of things, the contours
the names they nest of thickets supporting a canopy as memory
in your body in moiré. Espesor, a burning ache inside my
keep belonging body. Now, skin is rendered as paper walls
to your insides in triplicate, and the bad I feel curls up like a
but the misfortune lacks any magic squirrel in a bark sore, dies & renovates
though it sustains itself on your saliva now as new bees in hives.
and never knew thirst I stand to start walking, not begin.

What else is there?

-336-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | III
[en el origen de tu memoria & tenderheaded]

In the origin of your memory I got lightheaded upon standing

there is no silent forgetting at the bottom of everything.
only a rigid sleeplessness I stare before taking my first steps.
a heavenly body on its side I talk like I was there at the time,
a sky torn to pieces I was plaiting my hair into powertrines.
& the umbilical cord The skull of a doll can be its own loom,
that ties you to the memory I caress your hair with thistles of wind.
where do you go Who am I if not
when you’re absent from yourself who are you?

Reflections -337-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | IV
[no tienes pasado & face growing on an aubade]

You have no past You don’t notice your own heartbeat

nor a common life until you take your hand to search for it,
your heart enters through the same door as if the pit of a duture date, the first root
that you built underground searches for its break towards growth
at such an elevated cost on the outer plane. Death talks to its part’s
now it tells your secrets alone content & I respond with an aubade.
with the voices left to their own devices The signs speak thorugh like writhing
trusting in your desperation sighs, converted into gasps for life.
Objects are just writing etched into space

like a bell’s vibration through itself.

That thread is yours,
this thread is mine.
At & is are differing degrees
of engagement. But each angle
forms the same scale circle,
hems a net of the same atlas.

You tether through the ether to her.

I watch the whole blanket untold ,
emote as te amo.

-338-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | V
[la palabra que señala tu enigma & in seething hide]

Breath on glass breed

as coral wreathes & cloak themselves
The word that signals your enigma from seething like a ghost corsair.
is written on the reverse of your dreams
of a cord made of air Stars mottled as agate blots
tense trace in time lapse their framed paths.
it hangs in silence
on the surface of the night it is written Night anoints my glittering needlepoint,
& written in pierces with a bead of ichor leaked from the
the landscape of your days fingernail clip of crescent moon.

I can see your touch from here

enacted in evaporate thatches
of cotton patches. You give a saw
to part agog the brain fog.

You write a trail that clears a space,

along one warp curve of absent wire.

Reflections -339-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | VI
[que la costumbre sea tu casa / still beyonding]

The more I do this, the more I get

That the routine become your home the marionette’s sewn mouth. But
and the stature of your ills it’s not that, yet someone else you
rise to its feet abet, like a tap on my left shoulder,
over the grass I turn around, see no one, someone
or a clandestine tongue isn’t write... is it me? I keep walking away
that crackles from the cold as if there’s nothing holding the salted
before your enigmas avocado sandwich on whole grain in
and seats itself at your table my grasp... I leave it for the shadow the
just in time for lunch. sun leaves & she who grows beside,
behind, & still beyonding.

-340-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | VII
[con el esfuerzo de la palabra / paragrimagemes]

I let myself trail like a splitting tear

on a windshield as if the middlee
parting
of hair could make a map of there.
With a struggle over language
that has no end What matters is this oceanic scene &
or it contributes to raising the borders score with a sugar glass patina melting
with that acknowledgement into kin shares. I will make my way back
you walk toward your true form
the one you abandoned yet only when the other side
beside the cup of coffee makes sense to. I sit here wondering
to which you will return how it all seams. A stem of hay I see,
if on someday you find yourself standing I append it to an ingot knot
on the other side of the fence of a falcon’s casting as an article of
at the shore of your illusory life. the letter a. Likewise, in an owl’s pellet,
there is death nesting,
a hive hum of regurgitated being.

I keep this moment to me,

an umwelt in my hand.

Something protects
this atlace, at least.

Reflections -341-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | VIII
[donde nace esa pared que ande en linea recta & salyre]

I’m looking for an end of the world I

can touch with my hands, of an earth
Where is that wall born which forms a straight that I can pin back, a balayaged strata
line & does not know rest wing bang of mountain rock & show
the ear behind facets of experience,
it collects your paths in bundles cute to the heart of things like a braid
& plants scrub in your memory of grain. In Latin salire meant to leap
multiplies the shadows under your footsteps & spring. Sometimes, the breezes assail
themselves & spark me to take up
with what fervor it caresses its echoes gamboling, soundtracked by strums
and liberates the dizzying flight of the wind & peals of a crystal bow...
before sprouting in your heart.
The thrill of this, my triumph
of my desire once at, now obtained.
I traipse, I skip, I stumble, I stand, I
can stand it, I learn to stoke myself I,
will hopscotch between these crumbs
of ruin, & other such slags of structural
fluxion.

-342-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | IX
[no conoces del viento sino su fria libertad / shelter]

Unbound, piano wire floats, dust

motes or forest fire smoke of its own
You don’t know the wind apart from its accord. Restrained, they take notes.
cold liberty I hate when the wind snatches at my
settled at the bottom of your respiration graying hair, but sometimes that’s the
pulled along by its hair only way I can move on. I carve myself
when it’s necessary a rib to rest in bangled echoes with my
dragged along by an earring in shadows own shout, for through my own blunders
receding like a wound that it can be a good ground. Isles of hope
opens in combat arrayed like gems in space from a me
brooding like a chain choir of bruised
rubies, these bylines of flight entomb
a nom de plume.

Reflections -343-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | X
[esta ausencia te sirve como sombra / pastureland]

I feel more real whenever I see you

The absence serves you as a shadow around. Maybe it’s just a trick of the light,
the wounded spirit your bones exude but I can feel my blind spot close up.
the butchered liquor behind the still
that place chosen by the unyielding The gash of the ancients, caked
with mulch as scarred over ash
every beach or sky of possible firmness purifies the silt for tilling & hews
dies on the day of your birth potential routes for generations.
heavy with centuries
The greatest embalmer of hearts,
but in your interior now in seeds in, is garden thyme.
all that moves is a whisper of a forest. You’re a foil that with each mail over
enriches the soul. I’m the soil, & she
keeps the time.

-344-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | XI
[abandonaste tu infancia, ese portento; / fright & cleft]

Portent wouldn’t be right, right?

You abandoned your childhood, that wonder; Because that signifies a sense
you left your shadow at the edge of of near futurity mered in the cloak
the door, as if anticipating your own return, of fear. Tenderness is lost in
as if the sobbing of the courtyards mattered to you the breath of that sectre on my
the voices of the walls, destroyed by the neck. I cupped it up, a campfire’s
smoke, the demands of the cedar tree, brothy aura, & sat in the threshold
inconceivable for the crowd, made between my old room & the steppes.
flexible, at the pace of your tears.
Of course the subject lodged
in the object matters to me,
especially when what I take
for granted (aqueducts, barricades)
is cleft into lesions of riftlesias,
veining cracked bone marble.

Reflections -345-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | XII
[en esa encrucijada / cypselae]

At the crossroads
that is your life Toward the depth of us, then,
where my marrow stems in fractals
where the paths are nameless like boughs of yarrow, sanguinary
& the steps are measured inwardly tributaries, downy plumajillos, pillows
as if searching for their roots for those who rest in cavities, I see
there are no secret oceans myself foiled in a thousand reefs,
fallecido, but I also see a counterpoint
nor daybreaks under control that spores a cinder to an unwicked
only an endless wait line, glitterstuck to lobes of cloves,
an invisible pulse of glow
and the density of solitude. that hairlines into every somewhere.

-346-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | XIII
[no esperes que la soledad / letter from the world at hand]

There’s a coast of ivory absent from

your gumline that animates a seam,
that’s what I was thinking as a breeze
kicked over a pamphlet out of time with
my steps. From the carcass of a stock
Don’t wait for solitude market, there was a scab of outer paper
to wipe out your bank accounts missing, a speck stem of a lower case a
beg the sun skimmed away, as instead of an o,
the way ruin excoriates things slowly I
the air n the nectar of neglect, the quicksanding
of a relinquished, sociery kissed by a knife
to tangle up your ghosts in the neck.
in the no man’s land
that is the night. “Interest builds shores in time” the edited
script said,I spent every cent I had shaphing
a tiny replica of that failed century in stacks
of sepia nickel & the strips of chinese finger
traps that hold coins.

Time can’t move on if it stops.

In a land where o thing casts a shadow
I hold this close to me as something
to feel. The night is a city, still.

Deliver me

Sentir,
sign nature

Reflections -347-
 Fragment of Abnegranite Cartagraph | XIV
[sobre este cielo tallado en piedra / paraform

A compass is just a watch that tells

space, but it is also a bow or beam,
pencil & needle joined by a paraform,
& meta-arc that’s protracted & done us in.

Upon this sky sculpted from stone I roam to her & of her because love
upon this granite is the simple act of listening to friends,
even those you’ll never know. Who am I
you can build your path but a wanderer out of order about a lost
center?
go down to the heat of the rocks
interrogate yourself with respect to this point I can’t be the wind that shifts the sands
squeeze with a thumb like you can. I am she who adorns the
affectles ampersand. You can’t give me
as if you dealt with some anything that I don’t already have.
purulent wound
I just want to be there for you,
separate it from the rind like a good sower’s plan.
of the skin or the ashes
that evoke monuments What is writing but conversing with
yourself aloud beneath recovers of
burial mounds in depth being along by lashlight?
carved outside of its jurisdiction
you may Not forts but fonts of blankets,
for we are not kids, but kindlings
if you wish to either light our ow ways or
camouflage ourselves through
even out your pride and misery our own hells.
change the course of the currents
turn them towards your purposes.

-348-
 A planet is a watch that tells space.
I didn’t do anything but what you said to

in that end

Take me at my word
that’s all there is

Reflections -349-
AUTORRETRATO
SELF-PORTRAIT

The translated “Autoretrato” (self-portrait) essay that follows was

written by Parra in 1997 for the national newspaper El Nacional
as part of a series of personal essays by Venezuelan artists. At the
time, she would have been about 58 years old; and by then she
would have lived at least two decades openly as a trans woman
in Venezuela.
Trans readers might be interested in reading from her essay
a sense of disillusionment and distance from the world around
her as a consequence of being marginalized as a trans woman –
indeed, this is one of the most common themes in the lives of
trans women I know – to go out, to leave the house, to engage
with others, to engage in our communities or not engage at all,
that is the question for many of us.
And perhaps the fact of being trans is what Parra refers to
discreetly as the “important detail” and “strange occurrence” that
made her life so different and difficult to reconcile with Venezu-
elan society. Perhaps also relevant for trans readers is the way the
essay casts Parra’s efforts to undergo a spiritual transformation as
the defining narrative of her life – a transformation in the way
she sees herself and the world rather than a physical one marked

-350-
by struggles with gate-keeping, the triumphs of medical mile-
stones, or gritty details around the various troubles she faced.
The restraint of her essay might have also been an indirect
way for Parra to resist the ugly gossip and speculation with which
the cis Venezuelan media and elites, including her literary col-
leagues, isolated and dismissed her. The veiled allusions and con-
tradictions and philosophical tone of the essay might be part of
an effort to reject the lurid “revelations” the paper might have
expected her to make for its audience. Indeed, she confronts the
question directly and makes clear her refusal to play that role,
writing almost mockingly or as if exhausted, “I’m sorry to say
that there are no revelations to make.” Which, understandably,
might be frustrating for trans readers expecting more clarity or
criticism and confession or practical discussions of trans issues,
especially since few such accounts are available to us from pre-
vious generations of Latin American trans people. But the essay
we have before us is an intimate, expertly woven, entrancing, and
devastating portrait nonetheless.

Note: (1) The few words in brackets are my own. They’re intend-
ed to clarify or provide context without inserting language that is
not Parra’s into the text. (2) My translation of Parra’s “Autorretra-
to” is based on the text that was reprinted in the 2003 anthology
of 20th century Venezuelan women writers, El hilo de la voz:
antología crítica de escritoras venezolana del siglo XX.

Reflections -351-
Esdras Parra
“Autoretrato,” El Nacional (1997)

I think I arrived late to my youth and my life. I write this and I’m
the first to be surprised. But there’s a lot of truth to these words.
I come from the [Andes] mountains and this circumstance, per-
haps, has determined my way of being and my perspective of the
world and what has happened. I come from a remote place and,
in a figurative sense, my path toward myself has been long and
torturous. A path that has as its end the discovery of one’s own
conscience should be that way, arduous and difficult. And, as
far as achievements or maturity can measure, I believe I haven’t
gotten there yet. And, much worse, I think I’ll never get there.
My youth and my life have been left as if by the wayside, and I’m
not speaking simply of the past, while I remain alone with the
illusion that everything makes sense and that it’s worth living.
And now, at the threshold of old age or perhaps already far
along into it, I ask myself if there was an important detail that
made this journey more awful than for others. Or if there was
in me, in my destiny, in my dreams, something I ignored on
the journey, that was in a way decisive and that placed me in
the context of my life. All of this, like life itself, continues to be
a mystery to me, a mystery that I will never be able to unravel
no matter how much I struggle. Therefore, I have no alternative
but to accept it and accept myself in my ineptitude, without
bitterness, without resentments, without laments. And this, per-
haps, is what, with humility, I believe I’ve done during the course
of this sinuous, drawn out path, amidst the victories and the
losses.
I see myself, then, in the center of many, countless scenes, as if
they were projected against a screen. Here, in this city [Caracas],
where most of my life has taken place, and in other cities, distant

-352-
and beautiful, in different times and situations. And in the town
where I was born, in the mountains of the Andes, where I spent
my childhood and part of my adolescence, to which I return
whenever I can. The sap of those rough landscapes, a bit wild,
circulates through my veins. I said earlier that the mountains in
some way conditioned my character. It is no lie. My fears (and
how I cried and was afraid in those times!), my reserved manner,
silent, a bit discreet and secretive, even my soberness, my mean-
ness and my selfishness, which are real, are products of those
climates. I am, somehow, those climates. Isolation and solitude
pleases me. It’s the latter that I cultivate as a precious resource. I
owe the few things I’ve written to that alone. I’m like the inhab-
itants there, hardly sociable and dark, trapped inside my shell.
(My mother was a small and vigorous india [Indigenous woman]
born in those desolate mountains.) But I am also like the stones,
the rivers, the earth, indifferent and cold, struggling within the
frame of a strange and indomitable passion. Indifferent to my
own self (which does not mean carelessness over my appearance)
and to what might be my destiny.
Since I do not have, and have never had, a clear idea about
my destiny, nor what I should do with my life, I’ve tried, within
my limits, to enter into the world in different ways, to become
a part of it. Of course, I missed the mark. I’ve failed, without a
doubt, in my purpose, time and time again perhaps because of
my hesitation and ineptitude and impatience, or because of an
error in the way I focused on my efforts. In the end, for motives
I can’t explain, and for that reason, without meaning to, without
wanting it, I’ve become somewhat distant from the world, like at
the margins of human events or, in other words, from history as
a collective struggle. This distancing from reality might have had
grave consequences for someone else, but thanks to my fluid,
malleable personality that is stripped of prejudice, and my ability

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to adapt myself to any situation, I’ve managed to navigate all the
obstacles that this strange occurrence has caused me. I’ve had to,
then, live by struggling, without considering other ways out.
Like any other person, I can say I did not choose to live in
these places or times. I believe, however, to the disdain of those
who think differently, that these have been, and are, the best
places and times. I share the ideas and feelings of the people of
these times. I am also of these times. I’ve been marked profound-
ly by the pressures and turns of the society of our time, without
this, however, having fatally determined my way of seeing and
feeling. To a certain measure, I’ve remained intact, within the
infinite complexity of existence, having accepted the mystery of
life as the most impenetrable of them all.
Still, I’ve tried to draw on the best that this life and this time
have to offer. And not, in some way, to glorify my ego or for a
selfish and obstinate love for material things, though it would
be a common thing to admit. But rather, for the desire, never
confessed out loud, to enrich my spirit, to make it shine, to make
it into a flame. Though, this may be an impossible feat. My life
has consciously revolved around this absurd, unrealizable effort,
and because I don’t have any ambition or obsession in the least, I
feel free to make of myself what I please, even free to speak about
these things with complete liberty, without fear or hesitation.
And to use the most simple language to speak here.
Given the challenge, as has happened here, to try to give
a brief explanation of who I am, or to put forward something
to the effect of a revelation, as might be expected, I’m sorry to
say that there are no revelations to make. My life couldn’t be
more ordinary or insignificant. I don’t know where I’m going or
what currents push me along. I don’t know who I am beyond
the images to which I referred to earlier. I don’t know what is my
purpose in this world. As for everything else, I have no doubts. I

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have no honor, nor homeland, nor faith. I lack the values upon
which one bases a belief system. I ignore everything that defines
a human being. I remain as apart from things, be they society,
family, tradition, history, as I was in my youth, or perhaps more
than back then, now that I know there is no hope. That the fu-
ture does not exist. That only the here and now prevails, and that
in this reduced space, which is the present, the drama that is ours
is resolved. I face this reality without contemplation. I’ve been
born and I’ve lived. I can say that’s enough. Existence in itself,
alone, explains its own self and is sufficient. What else can I add.
My words, like that weapon that returns to its point of origin
after being thrown, are addressed to my own ears. I am my own
partner in this conversation. I write to myself and for myself. For
what is inconclusive, undetermined, halfway done within me,
because that’s what is at the depths of my consciousness. I am, I
continue to be, a project in the course of being realized. A project
that, otherwise and without a doubt, by the sheer will of things,
will remain this way, a project. I’m happy to say it now that I
have the chance, now that I find myself toward the end of my
life, with the weight of all that cargo of mementos, memories,
feelings, longings, dreams, frustrations, etcétera, upon my back.
Now that my back begins to bend beneath the weight, wishing
to set it down at first turn of a corner.
If I look back, I see in retrospect how and with what fre-
quency I’ve been wrong. I admit that I haven’t been a constant
mistake. And that at this moment I’m adopting an erroneous
position or at least one with which I can’t be in complete agree-
ment. And since I accept myself without believing in anything,
not in the magnificence of life, despite this magnificence being
the only thing that sustains me, nor in the inexorability of desti-
ny, I feel, moreover, that life had never demanded as much of me
as it does now. I’ve circled unceasingly around myself searching

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for a nonexistent center, with the disposition of my will set on
hoping to find it. I’ve come a long way thanks to my luck, or at
least that’s what I think. If luck remains with me, I’ll advance a
little further, perhaps time enough, if possible, to leave a record
of this incredible journey, that this can explain itself by means of
thought and action. Or perhaps, what would be ideal, to main-
tain silence.
As for people, you are the way you are. If one assumes the
risk of simply following that, in a complete sense, then so much
the better. Nevertheless, I’m like everyone else, that is, nothing,
no one. I don’t have any illusions. The thought devastates me.

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