In this poetry collection, pain becomes a verb, absence, loneliness, the days marked on a calendar without a year, without seasons, with the lunar orbit hidden somewhere in its body. In Belén Mateos’s words, it is “a voice that embraces the truth of what cannot be saved.”
At Zenda we present five poems from On the Other Side of the Abyss (Olifante), by Fran Picón.
***
I did not want to be born in August,
nor in a large metropolis either,
I would have liked to dawn
among the autumn leaf litter
in some small suburb
of a discreet city
and nameless,
beyond the last corner,
just before the crossroads.
I did not come into the world at the usual hour,
I lost a shaft down the drain of my navel
and time among the loops of the umbilical cord,
I dragged the placenta toward the wild side
while in the musical thread of innocence
the wrinkled voice of Lou Reed sounded.
And it is that in August there was nobody,
they picked me up as a matter of routine in the slip of birth,
and in the incubator of the employment office
I sketched my first tearful poem.
I was born a man by chance
and not by vocation, perhaps by accident,
since then I reclaim my feminine side
and on the skin I have logged the desires,
in that moon without orbit or Selene,
barely in a hidden corner of my body.
And I never, ever wanted to be born in August.
***
IN your smile there hides
a certain sadness
or, perhaps, a sigh
that is force between the eyes;
the silent scream of a warrior
who battles without fears
in the firmament of time,
the uncontainable fury
of a desire and so many silences.
***
To my mother.
I am the same as my father,
although we do not resemble in anything,
not even in the simplest things.
I look in the mirror
and I see my father, while in the image
the shadow of memory escapes.
There is in my hands a generational imprint
that shapes me, the uncontrollable inheritance
of a tearing in the entrails,
the silent scream of an yesterday misplaced.
And in the drawers of the everyday,
there where the evident becomes matter and takes life,
in that place where I never find myself,
there, in those drawers, I thread
the faint awareness of the inevitable
and I remember, without doubt and with pride,
that I, I am the same as my father.
***
I remember that plot opposite my house,
its stones and sand circling the games,
the noise of absences between the windows
and an old car abandoned
that was our boundless journey to what was forbidden.
There was always a scent of uncertainty
in each landing of the staircase,
the taciturn touch of closed doors
and doormats soaked
with so many nameless footprints in the mailboxes.
The hurried breakfasts and cookies spread with jam,
the cases full of rainbow pencils
and eraser remnants erasing ignorance,
a compass orphaned of curves
and a protractor of angles toward the impossible.
The lab coats in the schoolyard
concealing the poverty that lived in pockets,
the impenetrable gaze of an old teacher
who, with a cigarette tattooed on his teeth,
guarded the good name of appearances.
Perhaps memory is a compulsive lie
and memories are only the deceit of time,
but I, now that gray hairs hold absolute majority
in a semi-abandoned congress in my head,
remember that old plot where solitude did not fit.
***
I look at myself in old photographs,
so faded as to be unrecognizable,
with cheeks full of hope
and saliva hanging from between the lips,
with that woolen cap at the fontanelle
and a slight tremor in the feet.
It is unsettling to see myself before I knew myself,
when the shadow of what I wanted to be
was still only a faint trace in memory,
in the precise instant that passed by
while my fingers wound around the wind
trying to grasp the unknown.
Perhaps I was never a child,
except in those old and yellowed photographs;
perhaps childhood was forgotten on the platform
of a desolate station
and at the next subway entrance
I will find my reflection in the ticket dispenser.
Never, ever, never was more than another never
on the vertical horizon of a skyscraper,
and the only lost children I managed to see
did not want to be discovered.
And this endless story
in search of my fairy godmother
ends abruptly when I open my eyes
and observe, with no disguise other than the evident,
that the ticking of clocks was never a crocodile.
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Author: Fran Picón. Title: On the Other Side of the Abyss. Publisher: Olifante. Sales: All Your Books.
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