***
Warm-up
4 in the morning. I wake up.
Hills of fog.
There is something ominous about the red
electronic glow of the clock radio.
I search among books
– Niebla by Unamuno, curiously –
my navy blue jumpsuit.
How many waters have we crossed
I think of the bridges
of the short memory
in which, at my young age
I grow pale -not gray hairs
my older brother assures me-.
Shower and come down.
Perhaps at this hour of dawn
at eleven years old I could be happy.
I’m not writing poems yet
although I sketch an ode
to cable television.
Metropolis Intercom came to stay.
And it did not separate us, nor close off
contact, fate
could be rehabilitated with little.
A film on Isat. Now we wait
for Julio. We have an hour before
Rocky 1 starts.
We will use that time
to train in the neighborhood square.
Julio is as always punctual.
He is embedded in our warm-up routine
like a sapphire – one of my
first images of friendship.
We cross a bestiary of fog
with split lips and sport attire
until we reach the square.
And we train. For an hour
we had that rare certainty of being alive.
We train because that is why
we woke up early.
We throw combinations into the air
we jog among shrubs beneath the dream
that we do not interrupt from the poplars,
we repeat the blows
the routines in the dark.
Squats, a gentle jog around the square, quick steps inward
until we touch the wall
(the squares adjoin houses)
the cold making fire in our lungs.
without names, without words.
With red faces, panting,
we return. Everyone sleeps
in the passage. Perhaps we are
weather or fog
at this stage, I think but do not note
anything, the wheel of writing does not push me yet.
Refrigerator, what a fitting word
to describe where we come from
and where we will preserve
these shards of dawn
before we become
what we were meant to have been
Prepubescent rocky-primaries and Apollonian-secondaries.
before life presented us too much to its Ivans Drago.
***
Ball
The earth spins like a ball
between the feet of a child
in Blanca Varela’s football poem.
Thanks to the image that the poem
instills, the ball ceases to be
a mere object
and becomes a state
of things that swirl together
thoughts, worries
paths, physical or of time.
From livestock to farming there is a ball,
from home to work, another.
From one verse to another
the ball is not
a end in itself
nor a means to an end
but an atmosphere
-a condition of possibility-
like amniotic fluid.
The earth spins like a ball
but only when we see it
between the feet of a child
let that be the condition of possibility
for the poem as a ball.
Air doesn’t spin,
it contracts and expands
between your fingertips
splendidly beautiful
it covers
from inside
to the outside
your smile
which at your age you cannot distinguish
from a spasm
(though it amuses you).
Air doesn’t spin like a ball
rather it contracts and expands
like the strings
of an old racket.
***
Forty
A pass you didn’t see coming
a blow to the head
Will bad news arrive this way only?
Joy, it seems, is harvested
and in the best of cases pass
unnoticed like neighbors
office workers on any given day.
I realize that the party I missed was good
and that’s why after forty
the somber tone, the blazer, the shirt
one or two escapes
to the dry cleaners,
what is a dry cleaner if not a sublimated form of a craving for red wine
a winter night
with childhood friends
snug in a botellón
laughing until it hurts.
***
Monologue of a Father with his Days-Old Son
Take care of your body as you would a garden.
The mind always blank, remember
that is the only objective of the objective:
to breathe and enjoy the path
(the Ithaca lesson):
arc, ear, lyre, poem.
Replace poem with pubalgia.
The body is cared for like a garden
a rock a hedgehog, a image of God
that once it opens is pure water
and music, in its own way, the song
that you like the most, the silence that comes after
a beacon,
Play clean and as direct as possible.
do not let yourself be dazzled by hendecasyllables
(but learn them).
Always respect the transitions.
Have faith in the dribble
in you and in your teammates
who are united by the subtle rule of interdependence.
Raise your head.
Even if you do not have a second
before hitting the ball
raise your head.
If the defense is crowded
and the path is blocked by kicks
stop, latch on.
To open the lock, crosses raining.
Even the pot counts.
***
The Contemplative Sedentary
“For my lifelong friends”
I
Short and light
the signature of my mother
like the contraction of the myocardium
in an electrocardiogram.
Left-handed, just like her
it doesn’t take me much to imitate the strokes
to skip classes
of physical education.
We swap athletic life for vita activa:
we dance cumbia and read Vallejo
at an aunt’s house -she works until late-
at eleven in the morning.
II
Novillos, cimarra, rabona
there is a different word
for the same thing and language
twists our teeth
(we clash with the theory
of correspondences)
exposed to the gaze of the old
a Symbolist gang
of the 19th century in the 21st century
smoke and coats
while others practice
set plays, short passes,
volley serves.
III
How to camouflage a school uniform?
Impossible to go unnoticed
but downtown the bars
open their arms to the children
We pray to San Diego
San Serrano,
San Ramírez Eleuterio.
IV
Unconditional love for our athletes
Pizarnik, Lihn, Tellier, Rojas
Baudelaire, Rambó, de Rokha
“Hear you métèques, you do not write poems, you imitate!”
shouts the literature professor
in the hallway.
The hallway leads to the courtyard
d where multiple games happen at the same time.
I want to jump onto the court,
get lost among football players
in the bathroom mirror
to see someone not very original
and not suffer for it.
“Rodríguez, how long will you stay sick?
Join the class, come on, light jog,
it will do you good to breathe”,
says the physical education teacher.
With my left hand sunk into the jacket,
I stroke the spine
of the Lihn anthology
-Citizen’s Books Collection-
as if it were the spine
of an animal
that I must cling to
and that I carry hidden
from the school.
Perhaps next week.
***
A Lock of Your Hair
Version for Elliot Weinberger
Lips chapped by the cold
at six in the morning.
Students with denim backpacks
in a space between the sidewalk and the street
that the ministry of transport
calls a bus stop.
The acoustic image of the word
relic smokes on a memory balcony as if chewing
remembrances: your pale red-haired indifference,
the fear of asking whether I carry your
backpack.
Again a victim of a lance thrust
in a gravel desert
without stereo staff, without a clock
I hurry up to the room
with the restlessness of a fifteen-year-old.
The nightstand drawer opens like a flower
in the mind of a carpenter.
In my hands opens
the obituary
-another flower-
I still keep for myself
a lock of your hair
next to the tip of a school tie
I take care of it as if it were
the egg of an animal
that I am certain will go extinct
in a few years.
The leaf exudes its aroma
a mix of cologne and balm
and fires off frames of things
that never happened
(and that will not happen
she tells me with her eyes
Snoopy, from the bottom of the obituary).
I didn’t deserve that love
but that wasn’t the reason
I lost it:
the micros changed routes
Today my heart lives in peace
without illusions
in a 2×2 apartment.
***
Dear Adamo:
I know: a perfect song has an infinitely small vocabulary. It isn’t different with the poem either. Last night, while I thought about how many distinct nights can coexist within one night, until they become a single great night, like a moon in total eclipse, or like a deity that asserts itself in every stem, in every robin’s egg, in the contact of lips on the forehead when giving the blessing, I wanted to ask you a few questions: Do you think in stanza or line? Do you favor tone or timbre? Melody or memory? Answer me when you can.
***
Our Novel
Version for Verónica Zondek
One day I shall write a great novel
and thus revive the fantasy of the leap
from verse to screenplay, Paramount, Netflix
HBO.
Accept it, you tell me
your prose will always be poor
the verses, even if they are shadow and anguish
always inhabit
the possibility of charm
I step out into the street.
I wait for a taxi, a syntax passes by.
There is nothing I can do about your tears,
we know that they pierce the roses.
The formatter of illusions
went on vacation.
Perhaps rhyme is not merely a fluke
but a form of love, let’s leave it
for now.
One day we will write our great novel
with four hands.
I propose, with the sincerity of birds
a game of editor to editor,
without getting annoyed.
Better not. We will both write
each on our own side
together.