District Line

Stopping, guttering, surging forward, slowing down
Bodies swaying, heads lolling, nodding off
A rhythmic pattern
With a book open on my lap
Eyes drooping, then flashing awake again
Marking Simon Bolivar's cry of "We shall never be happy, never!"
The montoneros rose up, surged forward,
only to be cut down brutally, exterminated
There's a creativity in stopping their motion
A horrific creativity that belies evil
Let's go to Latin America this summer, we agreed
We'll drink with the peasants, have tempestuous affairs, destroy the system, or become martyrs
for a cause that's a million miles away from our home.
The lulling again
A shiny patent leather heel emerges underneath an expensive coat
My mud-stained shoes wink and grin
A herd of cattle avoiding eye contact in rush hour
and all other hours
I rest my head on the glass panel
The flag was burned, and a few people objected
The majority whooped and cheered
Another stop, followed by a fluid motion
A land, because of its richness, made its people poor
Final destination
We were pulled out of the womb
And avoided making this world a habit
Fish swimming against the current
How harrowing
No rest for our arms or respite to our souls until we break the chains of those who oppress us
He said. How do we get out of this labyrinth?
No standing on the left.
We shall never be happy, never!

- an attempt at a poem

Dog's Walking Song

I will eat clouds with you, my famous Verónica. 

It will be the night of sirens, of police searching 

empty apartments for a starfish, 

of the bird that wanted to be a girl. 

It will be the day when the school flew.
The bicycles, the rollerblades
have worn down the moon and you don’t come
for teatime at home when it snows. Don’t you know?
I see a forest spinning in the washing machine.
But whenever you want, when you say so,
I will eat with you the hot apples
that tell us: time is a dream, too, the lost fisherman
who in the heavens made of linen wouldn’t know how to read my cards anymore.
Just a bit, a story, a small fragment.
That’s what we are,
drifting cupcakes.
But OK, what are you saying, so solemnly.
Now it doesn’t tend to rain and sunshine doesn’t come in: everything’s different,
say it like this,
everything’s in a different way.
It’s OK, it’s OK, what I want to say
is that we’ve seen things no one would believe:
for example, the harbor on the roof of the room.
I remember vaguely having once gone ashore there,
and everything was orange, the cars, the merchants shouting,
and the machines’ cranes cawing, and mosques in flames, insurrections perhaps.
No one knew to tell me: so many people in turbans.
What will I do with these fragments,
this work of burying bones.
There’s an antique piano on the hill.
When you return Ornella. The privateer plunders the Estate
Delegations in each village.
That’s also how I remember being happy
and another way was by invading the freshness, the years
were leaping forward like trout, the crystal was breaking
and that was our fortune. You came singing in the avalanche.
And now you already see it: inclined this way, I couldn’t spread the morning over us,
the yellow rollerblade that was scraping lines on life.
Oh llamando, llamando, llamando. This is the voice of the shepherds calling.
I wanted to live there and solitude
would ring out at times because you
were speaking or returning from work. And the children tell me
about our trip from yesterday, the moments never
will return and they are mine.
Perhaps our home wasn’t beautiful, deserted in twilight,
with the centuries breaking in like branches?
Do you like this outfit?
I will open the walnut shell’s windows.
With perhaps a little bit of our childhood, with a rusty gesture,
with the white words of winter, with the longing to be
fugitives and young, learning to swim in the adventure,
with that living moment, with the moss on my snout,
traveling through the land from rooftop to rooftop,
with some sort of smile, with the first months of love,
with the days that fall from our ellipse,
with your embrace, which is water, with the things we were,
binding all of this, who knows,
perhaps we have a satchel,
a happy satchel and to walk, to walk.

* By José Luis Rey, translated by David Francis

h/t Budour