Jorge Etcheverry

Translated from Spanish by Kate Grim-Feinberg

Look: A lot of water’s gone under the bridges. A seagull

from who knows where flies in circles over those bridges,

over the river and the mountains. Over the roof of the tallest

buildings, under the sun

 

–Together we will or won’t have a chance to imitate those paths

of the birds–at our level, over the earth

 

The only thing that will rise up is the twisted flower of our

conversations–its petals without contours, with no upper vertex

Listen to me. Hide your claws. Bury the warrior’s axe

these are not the times of your Indian ancestors. Where else

would your high cheek bones have come from?

 

–There are no more potato-eating Irishmen. The Acadians

buried the rifle and the cross. My grandparents with their Basque

berets no longer cruise the southern seas.  My probable

Sephardic ancestors have allowed the traces of their

lineage to be erased in that temperate southern country

 

–Don’t listen to the measured words from the city,

whose periphery we inhabited, advising you to be calm, sweet,

everything in moderation. Stop going to the pushover therapist,

educated in the suburbs, just out of college. The people

who know say two things:

 

–Poetry is subject to a specific form (this sounds like

prose)

–It has to be about universal themes that everyone can

understand. Don’t cook fish by itself and don’t bake the cookies.

Don’t walk the streets of Chinatown, sulky, remembering. Accept

the complicity of my eyes more than that of my hands. Of

my brain more than that of my genitals. Undo the tangle that

imprisons us as you would pull the kernels off a dry cob of corn,

like the ones you use to feed the pigs on your farm...

 
There’s a reason we’re the only real poets around here,

in this place filled with small circles, professors in suits, and

housewives who write in their free time. Like a hungry condor

our poetry has to let itself be carried away by the storm. Deposit

your life in this rhythm that’s come from the other side of the

world, that joins yours, a current that sprouts from the

North Pole. Together we can do anything, even revolution. I is not

an other.

 

I is an other, if you didn’t like the one I was wearing before

I’ll hide my claws and file my fangs. I’ll cover up

my tail with a long coat. I will cut my hair and look for

work. I will stop drinking coffee with my female friends,

always endowed with ulterior motives.

–I’m going to stop laughing at the poets here in the recitals.

I’ll stop drinking beer and smoking. I’ll stop eating

raw oatmeal in the morning—it makes me nervous—

with honey or sugar, or with jelly if there’s any

around.

 

You’ll go back to wearing your long faded skirts, and tying

your hair with a ribbon. And gathering herbs in the river

 

And I’m telling you for the last time: A walk through Chinatown

is worth more than the best published book. A cup of coffee

at the market while listening to a certain street musician is worth

more than a reading at Harbour Front.

 

I’m going to buy new blue jeans. I will say hello to your

feminist friends. The architecture of what must be done

rises up, still transparent, vague, and complicated,

like a Piranesi. This advice sounds fishy (the sacred

animal of Edessa). We must recover the space of these

thoughtless and hard-working people

 

The fact that we’re together is a universal revolution (assuming

I haven’t gone completely crazy)

 

Your friends and mine tore their hair out, tore their clothing,

threw ashes on their heads

And left with their music for some other place.