Escoges / Juan Sánchez Peláez

You Choose


You choose what vibration to begin

A flame is trembling in the dark alcove

The wheels that swing the sea are geraniums

Green is a gloomy steed

The sun’s open-mouthed step

A blind horizon murmurs orphaned

Presences demand

You select your ubiquitous love

Her bonfires and her vast river’s body

In the being under what cornices protect

You inflate

You deploy the candles

And you drag the uncertain scribble with eyes and hunger.




Rasgos comunes (1975)




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 2004 }

Signos primarios: XII

Juan Sánchez Peláez

Sostengo el árbol que acreciento. Y al astro redondo lo cubre una selva de hechizos. Tú pasas descalza en la noche como el relámpago en el corazón de la corteza. Con mi índice pulo lamparas en tu pecho. Una joven visionaria me busca en el sol de los macetones rubios y coloco en ella atención máxima hasta inscribir su nombre en la realidad y labrar mi deseo.

Rasgos comunes (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1975)

Signos primarios / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Primary Signs

I

At the doors of your life there is a single house. Between your image and the horizon, eagle on no centinel’s shoulder, she lets herself be. At times unruly against your love, she transcends the created, the flower and the water. She rectifies, with multiple bifurcations points out the today of your yesterday. She scrapes out the crazy bite of the scar and the dust. You open a crack in the mist to touch the inside, with no guilt, the pulp of your fleece. You float directly toward her flanks and her walls, you walk through immobile hallways with your gold ring that belongs to the dream. Who wants to float up the stairs to make a chain link of time within specific space, who clothes you and doesn’t exile the angel on your forehead in the immense morning, under the weight and deaf rumor of your real and invisible house?



II

Did your grandparents kindle timber, gifts, or legends here? In their moment, they were chosen to live another form and, even in their hours emptied for us, their sadness is amorous unconscious. Our adhesion, which is made of bones, marrow, and visceral foam, wakes them from the longest dream. We have two options when we face them: faithfulness and candor and, during the dialogue, to shake up memory at the mercy of our yesterday or show them a thin volume of errant stars here on earth, or fanatical dead roses with the dark fire that borders the precipices.



III

As one who erases a phrase from an
endless manuscript,
large, arboreous window shades rain,
spring and youth run, a river
slides very lazily in the grass.

The lips on a crevice over our root.

We pass.

               (The red mouth is muteness.)

               (Without a tear we eat the dead.)

Time still passes.

               (The last rose that our exclusive sister brings.)



IV

We filled a basket with hard stones and we saw that it was a white or black steppe, where wild desires trot, we later forged through the great river they name destiny like in a dream, through the wall of sunflowers and the glitter of song, very happy to follow and to elapse.



V

My shadow belongs to no one. The open road is yours and no one’s.

My light belongs to no one: it curves in my pockets like just another shadow, the sunflower’s nothingness in common.



VI

No one sees these eyes, desperate eyes like things written in dreams. No one sees me seated on a gold chair playing the universe with only the tide that grazes lip to lip, while I tune my flute to the law of the birds.



VII

                                                       to Juan Liscano

You have your own name
if you excavate within
and reject your fear of dying
that leads to dying
and if you accept the verb that guides
toward silence.
Written time stone tossed here
at our side
with the fragile stalks in which the spirit revives.
Free me by my hunger, from my hunger
and by my thirst, from my thirst.



VIII

Echo of a disobedient rumor
a rose secretly segregates
and carries me, insomniac,
                                             within real or illusory living
without a soundless north, Rose Selavy.



IX

The words sound like gold animals.

Scaring off the limits, you will drench the all and nothingness to suffocate vertigo, and they will become girls made of cotton.



X

We have begun with a speech and

with oblique phrases we love

and their silvery blue rooster heads.

We have begun, or not, sweet and

growling lady, and the secret enumeration

runs in the wind, over the purest

and incomprehensible errand, as we

walk by blurred, more or less mutilated.



XI

Less oblique than my dead man’s face, and desirous, a fish plunges; in the nebulous tower of the sea goes the fish, without the roseate eye of my guilt. One hundred times I clamor like the seizable diamond fish, with the nocturnal strangeness in my mouth.



XII

I sustain the tree that I grow. And the round star is covered by the jungle of spells. You walk by barefoot, like the lightning inside the heart of the crust. I polish lamps with my index finger on your breast. A visionary girl looks for me in the sun of the blonde flowerpots and I focus the utmost attention on her until I inscribe her name within reality and cultivate my desire.




Rasgos comunes (1975)




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Poesía, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }

Poema / Juan Sanchez Pelaez

Poem

The red jungle murmurs, murmurs, and suddenly becomes the heart’s entire reality, my red jungle. And she, who is a pendulum that swings in the moans, my red jungle, and she who exclaims with quick leaps of kindness, my red jungle, on the route that leads to that deeper forest beyond the anonymous earth allowing us to be nowhere and to forget ourselves, allowing us to not slip on the evaporating thing, allowing us the mediumistic voice of our certainty, and in peace, with no major errors, my red jungle.




Rasgos comunes (1975)




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Poesía, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }