The Hidden One is the new poetry collection by Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga: a work of love and contemporary mysticism that listens to what throbs beneath the surface of the real. Letters, sutras, psalms, and poetic prose that celebrate unity, silence, and light, in the wake of Saint John of the Cross.
*****
From “Nine Doors,” the poetics with which the book opens.
4. Poetry is the knowledge of fog. It is intuition put into language. It is clarity amid uncertainty and a definitive act. Poetry is an eagle. A knowing that flies, catching the word from the ground. Light that takes shape in blood. Eye and claw. A heart in the teeth. The moment that pronounces what it consumes.
Whether it comes as a flood or a trickle, poetry springs from what is hidden. The hidden that pleads for its liberation.
Poetry frees what is unknown and becomes knowledge. Knowledge of fog. Knowledge of the eagle.
*
A poem from the first part: “Letters to the Barefoot Woman”
Letter of the Talisman
I send you a talisman made from a lung.
I send you
my flesh
in the winter wind,
my flesh
that knows
how to fly,
my mouth
like dried leaves
that fall
into your lap,
into your sewing hand,
stitched
to you the talisman,
my being,
stitched
breath
to you,
my essence.
I send you the coins of my being
one by one,
I accompany you in your treasure,
in the chest
of the days
that seek to tilt toward sorrow
like cypress trees
in the winter city.
I split myself into fragments
flat,
navigable,
that fit easily beneath your door,
that roll smoothly along roads
and slip into the folds of the clouds.
Discreet
under your pillow
the coins
of my being.
Intimate
with your breathing.
There, in the simple movement of your chest,
while you sleep
they gleam,
they accompany you,
they know themselves as divine
and, offered to you,
they pass the night.
I send you a talisman made from a lung.
*
A poem from the second part: “Sutras of the One Who Cannot Return”
Sutra II
Do not allow the Arezzo devils
to seize control of the magical silence.
And respect the gifts received.
Honor the lust of the spirit.
Delve on the path into the basements of alchemy
and transform yourself in the transit.
The masculine and the feminine principles joined
together hold the key to the realm.
The bad dream is to perceive you
as separated
from the union
of opposites.
If you cultivate love
God is the world.
In the beginning,
the flesh was made, every flesh
for living
in the minimal.
How comforting it is
to find the opposite flesh
to fuse with it
and become again
oneself.
Only in this way does the clumsiness
prideful
of the solitary path end.
Only thus begins
a greater task.
*
A poem from the third part: “Ethiopicas”
Etiopica V
The sun seeks you in the crowd.
Eye of the sun.
Eye of the sun that blinks.
Rain has always been silence.
It is something all dictionaries know, all printed pages.
The sun is born from the eye of the origin.
There lie the letters of your name and the letters of my name.
They spin in the iris of the original sun.
In the fire of the eye, the words are forged.
I see you when you speak.
*
A poem from the fourth part: “Hidden Psalms”
Psalms VII
If I can meditate with a cloud in my hand
and a city in the other
what do History and death have to wound me?
If I can meditate with one foot on Earth and the other on Venus,
with the heart in the Sun, how can illness or pain defeat me, how can I cease to be moved
before the history of Jacob Obrecht, who ended his days in
Ferrara by the plague, after composing the
most beautiful music of his time.
If I can meditate spanning the width of the stellar infinite,
lying in the oval of the known universe, among spaces
of fire and void, what can time and its harvests disturb in me.
If I can meditate stretched across the seven dimensions, as long as I am, the seven dimensions that cradle the
material and invisible worlds, what currents alienated from my world would shatter me.
Only in you I am. Only in you I love. Only in love
in you I contain what is important and what is useless. In your love, the universe
fuses and distills.
—————————————
Author: Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga. Title: The Hidden One. Publisher: Sonámbulo Ediciones. Sale: publisher’s website.