Ketty Alejandrina Lis
(Argentina)

Ketty Alejandrina LisDay after day the waiting
without knowing what one awaits,
without knowing if the night,
naturally, is a friend,
or only the uninhabited morning,
taut. Waiting builds itself
a deformed cocoon, keeps watch
in a threatening environment.
What is permanent floats
in a cup of coffee
while around us the shapeless
shape of absence rules.
It's a road full of potholes,
a road built from the obseesive desire
for the car that's already passed,
the car that's not yet come.
Nevertheless,
now and again we are content
even knowing that another person
will sometimes shape the music we love,
our words, in a way we wouldn't.

Waiting is a slippery business.
Perhaps it comes to that.

Translated by David Romtvedt

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Saying goodbye

I looked for total love
in love without noticing how shaky the boundaries were
even though every day I crossed the platforms of the stations
where the faces were less than dark and fleeting ghosts.
I looked for beauty
in the noble forms of things possessed
but so much more in things desired
without remembering that extension and profundity do not meet.
A cruise on the Rhine with towers and battlements
reflecting feudal injustice upon the water
or by night in a gondola among
the palaces of Venice
will never comprise Mozart
or the magic fullness of the Lacrimosa.
I looked for the absolute in love
and plunged into the baptismal fount of powerlessness
unable to invent a single word
which would serve to get me started on the beginning
of saying goodbye to the irreverent candor of childhood
misty light of origin
(where would undivided existence be hiding
beyond the scattered fragments
that went on their way finally more or less together?)
goodbye to the essential idea of beauty
(when and where does its absolute value reveal itself?)
and goodbye to love
(how much cruelty
is hidden in the intimate?)
From a distance the bars of the cell
fascinate me. They look like painted strips
bordered with seaweed in platinum coral strands
it's just that from within the steel
is brutal in its hardness, I scrabble
like a wild thing against the high mossy walls
and I am alone
quite alone with myself.

Translated by: John Oliver Simon

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The dolphin

For Paulina Vinderman

I must be stuffing myself with dreams
or with daydreams
because, why not, today I threw away
the key to my grandmother's room
where I watch over and watch under
the flame of an unliving gene
that survives in volcanic puffs
and thistles slashed by the fierce north wind.
There isn't even oblique beauty
in the capsule that contains the awaiting
sedating grains.
But where will the sweet frail dolphin go
without her fish?
Without her fish she cannot despise logic
she cannot jump,
no, she cannot jump through the blazing hoop
nor flip the red, white and blue ball in the air
and follow the ritual
twisting and turning according to the rules
so everyone can hear the applause.
It doesn't look
like we're going to get any sun today either.

Translated by: John Oliver Simon

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Births

In gardens of stopped time
is born time's grief
so brief
volatile as pollen
crude as a sparrow's hop
looking for crumbs
by the little fountain of the Plaza Pringles
pouring into the sidewalks of C?rdoba Street
stunned
by the noisy surface of these mornings.
The day begins with the heavy brown of coffee
and the siestas rise on silver trays
offered to this Rosario of sun and black-winged sky
into a sleepy meadow below the pavement.
Every beginning's born out of death
and good and evil
and the perturbing riddle of eternity
take shelter hidden
in a tightly-pleated depth of shadows.
That's why the green substance of a leaf
makes a good refuge sometimes
pine needles
willow leaves
leaves of forgotten paradise
stirred by the lark's tame song.
Absences slide away in the book of no memory
and memory lost in the smooth skin
of the youth of old people.
Elegy's lullabye to being long ago
and all the luck to come and go as well.
Nevertheless
the serenity of your glance sustains me
and one of these afternoons
I'll have to try on my new face
scattered among the primal elements of earth
silhouetted in the hourly days.
Every end is a beginning
return
and end again
nothing's what it seems
emptiness full of illusions
and daydreams not only are not
they're smoke
they're dense
with one's own dialectic
self-war of opposites.
That's why it's good sometimes to take refuge
in the simple substance of the leaves.

Translated by: John Oliver Simon

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Sounds and silences

for Lina Macho Vidal

The sounds of the voice
can go on marching all the way to infinity
it doesn't matter.
Absolute space is drinking them up
with puffy lips
playing in a diamond-satiated sea
and never finding the beloved words
because the words slide free within language
and language
is an immense palace but also a cell.
Silences of the voice
cut off by the cage-work of imprisoned syllables
will they ever know what to do with their fragments?
If they only hadn't forgotten their primal love
that was denied to them
that was given to them
ideas that smash themselves until they drown
and those that curtsy
and end up breathing upside-down
not trusting their own gestures
their own actions
wearing themselves out in passageways
where the only permitted sign
is the perverse grimace of doubt.
Their only consolation is to hide
in the intense intimacy of an unwritten page
to break the habit
of getting stuck halfway out of windows
because daydreams slip in right there
and daydreams are heavier
than the tallest Pyramid of the Valley of the Kings.
Tiresome to hear them celebrating what never arrived
as if they didn't know that this feast of the ghosts
and the dead
is too close to the truth of never reaching at all.
Never mind the blind sands at the foot of the mountain
on the summit there reigns a bird made of purple muslin
and in her eyes the darkness of the day drowns.
Poor sounds poor silences
their cramped black maps
do not empower the forces of space.
Once they bathed their bodies in the river
they learned of the hateful victory of death
they learned that hate was present in love.
They, like us,
were deaf to the footsteps of time's blind guardian
and huddled in their circular songs
they hoped to find the pipes of Pan among the crags.
Sound does not fit into silence
and perfect silence
in whose eyes the hanging gardens
are born and grow
moves away step by step and it doesn't matter
if the springtime sidewalks invite us
to an eternal festival of odors
if Vivaldi wrote the Four Seasons
if the lilac-blue flowers of Paradise
will drizzle down tomorrow morning
if the trumpet sounds or if Heaven remains mute
with or without tears
with the horrible or beautiful word
with the lips closed or open
with our hands holding our heads
it's just us
revolving here.

Translated by: John Oliver Simon

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The philosophy class

It was entirely ours, that dark lecture-hall
with the acrid smell of clothing.
We were indecent lovely yearlings-remember?
by dint of being so young.
Outside
Entre R?os Street extended
its insane facade of graffiti-etched buildings
through the air poisoned
by the interminable passage of buses
and the hunched shoulders
and bitter faces of the people.
Words
descended from the podium like sensual polished grapes.
"Today, gentlemen" (we existed only in that 'gentlemen')
"let us speak of Socrates
and the two poles of his method,
refutation and maiuetics. For example,
can any of you tell me what, in essence,
Beauty consists of? I refer
to that which is common to all singular cases,
to that which makes something what it is and no other."
(Even today the inflections
of the lovely voice of Adolfo Carpio resound clearly).
Nostalgic memory
can be a bad advisor
and yet
if I could have for one moment
that power which belongs to the gods only
I'd like to bring the philospher here bodily
there's no room at the table for Antippe
and surely
she'd gladly be ironic among us women.
Maybe for that reason
we will not weave garlands of laurel or anise
for the Athenian. More likely
we'll make him drink that inhuman potion again
or we'll get out the hammer and nails
to make him suffer slowly on a cross
just as it happened in Golgotha.
Our well of darkness is a well and it's dark
and we can just as well
put it on a postcard with no margins or farther shore.
Yesterday, dear girl-friend,
as I left the Department of Humanities
it occurred to me that neither you nor I
were there in the old lecture-hall
nor the notes we took. The philosophy class
has another lecturer and other listeners under the beautiful quote
from Tacitus.
The rest is the same.
I'll breathe
the air poisoned
by the interminable passage of buses
and I'll feel sorry
for the stained facade of the buildings
and the hunched shoulders
and bitter faces of the people.

From the book: Piedra Filosofal

Translated by: John Oliver Simon

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John Oliver Simon nace el 21 de abril de 1942 en Nueva York y reside desde 1964 en el Area de la Bah?a de San Francisco, California, hasta donde llegaron sus antepasados, en el siglo pasado, durante el per?odo de la Fiebre del Oro. Escribe poes?a desde los 14 a?os y ha publicado m?s de quince libros y plaquetas, entre los cuales se distinguen ROADS TO DAWN LAKE (Oyez, 1968), RATTLESNAKE GRASS (Hanging Loose, 1976), NEITHER OF US CAN BREAK THE OTHER'S HOLD (Shameless Hussy, 1982) y LORD OF THE HOUSE OF DAWN (Bombshelter, 1991) y SON CAMINOS, su primer libro en castellano, editado por Hotel Ambosmundos, en México (1997).
Sus esfuerzos en la promoci?n de poetas latinoamericanos han dado como resultado m?s de doscientas traducciones suyas al inglés, publicadas en varias revistas y antolog?as de su pa?s. Ha sido director del programa de Poetas en Las Escuelas de California y en la actualidad ense?a sexto grado en un colegio particular en Berkeley, California.

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Forgetfullness

If we are not hold by memory
forgetfullness will overflow us

The young trees have been felled in the
House
I wacht myself and keep silent
I listen, oblivions.
The moving of the newly started life
spreads in sheds and the water
may be dripping of rain on bones
or smoke and pain of cruel torture.
I listen and keep silent. I think
-There´s surely some reason-
The brutal goose step of boots
hides in its gullet the sullen
pained astonishment of blood
silences the potter´s fields of islands
N.N. graves
and the fight planes throwing into the river
the dumb fear of human beings.
Bodyless eyes
peer ceaselessly in our eyes
to remind us of their stolen children
and here we are tame
looking into a landscape
that desintegrates this side of the sea
where black fall the light of dusk
without reason
with forgetfullness
the seditious word
time increasing sore spots
indifferent attachment.
Justice tocking across ruins
lent
bent
defeated
oblivions of torture
with pardons like shaming insults
the young trees have been felled in the
House
I wacht myself and keep silent
I listen, oblivions
To Rodolfo Walsh in memorian

Translated by: Oscar Vicario

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