POEMS FROM RADIACIÓN DE FONDO/BACKGROUND RADIATION
Is there something
outside, behind the last stone,
beyond the high hedges
that grow over the horizon?
Here rises up the tethered tree,
the buoy that lights up the monotonous waves
on their surface.
There perhaps a different ambit,
a different illumination,
a different wind over the grass,
without error or ashes
Translation. © Brian Cole
Vestige, dream put upside down,
certain shade uncertain
silhouetted against white sand.
It was a thing, full or hollow.
It was an organ, flow, mechanics.
Nearly a faint note in the infinite music
that progresses in great waves towards the red.
I speak to it, it does not respond.
Or it responds for him, or her,
not the body but its image,
not the anxiety but what of the anxiety
separates itself of the world and suffocates.
Translation. © Brian Cole
From life flees the little air
that remained under the leaves,
nothing retains it. Asphyxia,
cord that tightens,
the body that hangs,
immobile,
over isolated vestiges of love,
of world.
Translation. © Brian Cole
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CARLOS BARBARITO
POEMS FROM AMSTERDAM
Ashes of noon, under
a miscalculation,
an uncertain possibility.
The foundations of the only bridge give way.
Some stone remains,
a chunk of twisted metal,
a mouldy brick
on which flies copulate.
The bridge gives way, falls
into the night,
the dense net in which we are all fish,
flat, scarcely phosphorescent.
Empty fruits of dawn,
why should it not be a possibility of the blood,
a coded impression of the light
on a thin sensitive paper?
Pity burns in its centre.
Memory blazes in a stone square.
A door opens and no-one enters.
The echo mistrusts the shadow.
© translation: Brian Cole
I blame the water, the naked man,
the foot that dips in,
the distant smoke that vanishes as if in death.
Who walled in the garden,
possessed enough to make ashes
the one who should flow,
be transfigured, speak in tongues?
Every animal, diurnal or nocturnal,
is conscious of the fragile weight of its desire,
of the power of the plague,
of how useless it is to wash
in burrows full of mud.
And he plays on the wicked god, dust.
© translation: Brian Cole
She pretends, from apparent height,
to be precision, accuracy. But
she is naked, like all of us,
under what covers her. But
she feels cold when it gets dark,
she needs a lie
when she discovers, on the whitest wall,
a stain.
From all parts,
questions, sharp, urgent.
From an empty corner an oil flows,
tries to be an analogy of the living,
dries up and stops,
transformed into a narrow hole, into wretched theology.
© translation: Stefan Beyst
It does not matter in what language one writes.
All language is foreign, incomprehensible.
Every word, as soon as pronounced,
flees far away, where nothing or nobody can reach it.
It does not matter how much is known.
Nobody can read.
Nobody knows what a lightning is
and even less when it is reflected
in the polished metal of a knife.
Now, night seems a sea.
On that sea we row,
dispersed, in silence.
© translation: Stefan Beyst
