Ningun poema

"No envidio nadie nunca
ambiciono nada no debo
obediencia a ninguno"
{Café Tacuba, Cuatro caminos, 2003}


I

for the absent ones or indoors with steam
in her book of essays, Fanny Howe mentions
“The British Guyanese writer Wilson Harris has written:
‘The frame that conventional realism uses endorses
the absence of cosmic love. It consolidates the
nation-state and the vested interests of the nation-state.’ ”

maybe with this Jamaica Plain in mind, or Cambridge
on Center street JP with C., N. and A. after
sitting in the park by a frozen pond facing afternoon
sunlight, throwing ice slivers to break up on the ice
surface, along with stones and our branches
in the car, passing the bare tree above storefront
roofs, two dozen small blackbirds set on the branches
compact winter flowers, pensando en como se escribe


II

"ser delicado y esperar"
for the poem with stable
breath, a regular meter
to furnish the house

wearing frequently postured
English, scant originality
mostly desilusionado por
la falta de monte que me asedia
en estos lares, without being
sure that that's the right word

according to my notebook, Bolaño is
rewriting Kerouac and Cortázar,
identificandose (desde España)
as "latinoamericano," rather than
"chileno," "mexicano," or "español"

the swelling of the seas
not wanting to die so soon
hoping for the evening tea
where there's room for more

the Palestinian and Lebanese
poets I don't know but want to
Fadwa Toukan (1917-2003)
Salah Stetie read only in
Alfredo Silva Estrada's trans-
lations for Ediciones Angria

imitation theory, aire


*

Discussion

Over at Caracas Chronicles, an excellent discussion between New Left Review commentator Gregory Wilpert and Venezuelan blogger/journalist Francisco Toro. Toro's points are worth reading in full:

"Isn't it a hateful, discriminatory, borderline racist but at the very least exoticist vision of Latin America one that leads you to argue that the basic procedural and citizen rights that you take as non-negotiable in the first world are "unrealistic" in Venezuela? Is real democracy, real political freedom, then also unrealistic in Venezuela? Are we not entitled to it? Are we not fully justified when we fight for it? Or is it only in gringos and Europeans who are entitled to political freedom?

Societies need wildly unrealistic people, Greg, they call us intellectuals. Me, I will wildly unrealistically support any political movement that demands the democratic rights of all its citizens, whichever side of the political divide those people my be on. It's just that I can see, to my utter spookment, that many of the governments cadres - the ones I know are in Obispos municipality in Barinas, not the Caracas barrios - have an ultimately autoritarian attitude to political power to match Chavez's perfectly! Dogmatism and intolerance of dissent are a fundamental part of the president's political imagination, it's very hard for me to see how the resulting instability and extremism can be anything but damaging."