Manuel Vilas
Two poems translated from the Spanish by John Yohe
London
I would have wanted to stay there forever.
To find a minor obligation
that would give me, without shame,
just enough money to live.
To not return to Spain ever again,
and live anonymous
like a king in his invented dream of exile.
To attend the opera, under those dark
metro corridors.
And to know that no human face
would ever again be painfully familiar.
And to lose consciousness of language
and with it, in subtle vengeance,
that of poetry.
To not write anymore, to not have friends,
and strangely to attend
to my pleasant and moderate, noble english garden,
to guard my house and occupy my time
in the free and clear love of myself.
To reach an honorable old age,
after many years,
and the sweet loss of my lineage,
my name and my memory in a shady corner
of whatever london-esque cemetery,
there where I would have never met the destiny
which consumes me and to stand up to time,
to god, to the devil and all of humanity.
The Beech Forest
God gave the middle class good weather and summer
so they could enjoy swimming, the water and the light,
like a hope and announcement of an unequalled future,
superior to the splendor and government of tyrants.
Life and Spain were always filled with tyrants.
So the workers and employees arrived at the edge of the sea,
the river or the lake, with parasols and cheap hammocks,
with homemade food, with drinks in the cooler,
with new sandals, with flowery bathing caps,
with the newspaper, the cigar and mustache on the lip.
I don’t want to keep writing poetry. I don’t believe in it.
It’s a coward’s work, a job for needy legislators.
Poetry stopped serving life in order to serve the history
of poetry, an old temptation for men,
a ridiculous boringness, an empty glass at midnight.
I spend my life buying knives.
I look at myself in the mirror in the Hotel Bernadette,
dressed in white, with a silk tie,
like a communicant, with a rosary and cross
in my hands, earthy, clear, exalted and it’s not even
eleven o’clock in the morning and I’ve already drank
with inappropriate abundance, lavish hand on the bottle.
I look at myself in the dirty mirror in the Sahara Inn,
in Marrakesh, the red carpet almost blood,
the towels don’t remove the sweat from the bodies,
and the water burns, contaminated.
The beech forest is offended and I remember the past.
In the beech forest I search for raspberries and huckleberries.
I would like to be here, on the earth, like the beeches,
the oaks, the ash and the white firs.
The trees are like the dead.
My past is a river, a windmill, a knife, a fishing pole.