Teresa Arijón
Translated from the Spanish by Samuel Gray
Four Poems
•)
If I were a man I would shave with my grandfather’s razor—
I would graze the cleft of my chin slowly,
I would trace the corners of my face with an aesthete’s precision. What a
magnificent exercise of awareness and pulse,
to look into the mirror every morning, blade in hand.
•)
Arms crossed, the man evanesces in the remembrance of himself.
Like a snail, he carries his house where he goes,
and will die with nothing more than this: his peculiar concept
of a portable thing: himself, and his trail.
•)
All experience is unreal— the hand that lifts the pencil and draws on the page
the letter A and begins an alphabet
to say that all of life is a cloud
perfect in its destination— one and the same: disappearance.
•)
At the bottom of a well
whose mouth is sealed from the outside,
without even a crack for the light to pass through a man,
alone, with a bottle of water.
He should be thinking about the impermanence of things, but
instead he is trying to make out his toenails.
He has failed in everything: love, the
pure poetry of savage rapture,
the starving ideal of a life dedicated to art. Forty
years old, and he cannot see forward and he
cannot see back. (The past
is a curtain of smoke over everything;
the very idea of it darkens any use of the present, in a
certain way, leaves it behind.)
At the bottom of the well, the man,
who is Chinese and at the edge of death, but not really (and he
knows this),
imagines that he lights a match;
he can feel the grit of the sulphur on his fingertips: the
sudden flash that so fascinated him as a child becomes here,
in the well, a dimensionless dream. (Ghost without a face,
himself without aspect.)
At the bottom of the well, the man could be anyone, could
sink into the collective history like someone digging a mass
grave.
Hanged-man or hangman: he has lost his limits.
He does not notice the permanent weight he
throws over himself.
He would like to glide along the easiest route: to make
of his sharpened senses a here and now. But all he
knows is what waits for him:
hunger, thirst.
Like a suicidal monk, or as if destined for self-mummification, the
man—who had a wife once, whom he loved—
now, in the well, only wants a bell.
Just a miniature bell to announce that he is still alive.
He mutters, moments when he is afraid, words shaken loose from a
poem he cannot or does not want to remember.
He passes the tip of his thumb over his dry lips.
It would be easier, he supposes, to stop breathing. At the
bottom of the well,
the man would like to be judge of his own life, and to
tip the scales to the side of the innocents,
those who wait with nothing but their patient resignation for the
infinite developments.
And yet he knows that he is some way guilty for
being here, alone,
in the absolute dark.