Jorge Pérez Cebrián (Requena, December 27, 1996) is a Valencian poet. He has worked as a cultural manager, a teacher in literary workshops, and as a lecturer on the history of universal poetry. Currently, after studying Philosophy, he is pursuing a degree in Art History and occasionally contributes to literary magazines such as 21veintiúnversos, Anáfora, or Estación Poesía, among others.
Zenda shares five unpublished poems by Jorge Pérez Cebrián.
***
A MAN AND HIS REFLECTIONS
No one heard you leave the room.
I watched your shadow stretch out, like a tailor
silently taking his measurements.
I only remember that you said
it is the neck that makes daggers sacred. Then
you shook the sand from your sheets
and covered the mirrors with them.
Slowly,
as if you did not know
they would become funeral shrouds at our touch.
***
FLOWERS FOR CRISEIDA
Sometimes I find it strange
that the moss crowning the gods’ foreheads
is the same moss that covers you.
You don’t know this.
The petals are so cold today,
so white,
that the patient duty of the living
to bring springs to the dead seems almost absurd.
Sometimes I wonder if it was like that.
If she really advanced like the night,
under the black smoke of bodies
when you were still beautiful,
so beautiful, they say,
more beautiful still than a prayer.
I remember it.
When I was a child we woke early
and one day before a flower whiter,
colder even than this,
father told me
“these are the tears dawn sheds
while all men are still sleeping.”
Thus we learned dew,
but he did not tell us about the moss yet.
I was also beautiful,
but I have nothing,
I have nothing to envy the dead.
Sometimes I picture you laughing with dust on your knees,
your slender arms in the air,
before a cruel beauty
made us always lack you elsewhere,
to be only pain anywhere.
Every day grows colder, I know,
but I still remember, one by one,
the names of those ships.
I’ve heard those nights were made by the gods
to distract men from their own ones.
And I hope you don’t mind, but
there are so many, so many dead leaves
on your stone slab,
even though they’re always brushed away.
The fall is strange,
that the very desire that rocks them in the air
until they touch the ground
is the one that toppled our palaces.
I wanted to run,
I ran so much, playing in their gardens,
that not a breath remained to know where I was heading.
It was the first time I saw arrows
and the moon over the bronze:
peace had rusted the swords of my people.
Afterward there wasn’t a stone
that didn’t point at me:
all the ruins said my name.
When my hands tremble I remember them
on their warm skin. How strange, I tell myself,
the fire that welcomed us at nightfall,
how strange that this sky
is the same one.
Like all beautiful things
that men carry on their lips
my name swept through their lands,
their homes.
<p,>Appearing as a goddess, they called me Briseus’s daughter,
wife, for nine years, of Peleus.
No other hand soiled me.
That
the verses still remember.
What does it matter that they didn’t truly know my name.
You know? I like to think that sometimes
a bird lands on your flowers,
and it’s as if you were singing
(I like to think you would sing).
After all I grew used to understanding birds,
flowers and wool:
modest, naive, pious things,
that would never try to become more than what the sun has granted.
That’s why you
only now answer me.
When everything ended
I watched the ships depart
and I came back with nothing.
In this heap of rocks I remembered my mother,
my brothers
and you.
I don’t know if you are alive, friend, nor what you were like.
That’s why, perhaps,
you might answer me.
You were beautiful like a weapon.
I know.
They have drained the blood of men
and I take the same bus
when dawn breaks.
I bring you flowers
white, cold,
with the first dew of the morning.
And I gently brush away the moss from the rocks.
***
THURSDAYS
I had
a silver knife on the nightstand
and a verse from the Bible on my wrists.
And the music was real and I was real
and I kept it safely
like alchemy that dispels dust.
In the afternoon I recited Debussy
and we smoked all the time.
We looked at each other
But switch off the light,
let’s sleep tonight on the roof.
As if the sun were going to rise tomorrow,
as if tomorrow could come.
Let us look at each other
and tell me once more what music is
and, for the last time, tell me my name
as if it were still true.
As if my whole life
were true.
***
IT WILL BE FALSE TO SAY THAT ONLY THIS REMAINS
I behold it: the stubborn extension of skin up to its border of air. The dreadful vigil that barely marks where the bolt has died. The defenseless science of being alive.
I touch doors, frames, and windows, pass through the air like an ancient spell, and I know that this is not it. The hours that encircle my neck tell me to dive in. I close my eyes for a moment and sink into them.
There, the Greek would say, blinded by light and with the cold of first nakedness, the first verbs. There the earth’s poison that blooms, like a black staircase among enormous blue flowers. “It is the whiteness of death,” you say, and I take your hand.
It would be false to say here the patience of the insect, the wheel of days without its traces.
You are here.
Your name falls from everywhere like snow. Will you forget the wolves’ fur when you return? The names we gave to the birds?
There it is. A fragile creature that babbles our voice.
I have seen it drink my blood, utter barely a lost voice I do not know.
Walk, I tell you, walk among the ruins as if the purple gilded your touch.
This remains.
The curse of the air in your hair, the manes of your laughter trampling the world and the words falling on our shoulders.
We bear the years, the cold ages marked by a jealous god, all the freedom of the sentence.
And when you look at me again, beneath the trembling, under the superstition of winter, I will be alone.
Foreign I too will be, I will be the man who tells you in a wind of another language.
I will touch doors, windows, pass through the air and you will not be with me.
But it will be false to say that this is all that remains.
Look,
the world already begins to fall, with the majestic calm of ruin.
Then I close, since everything is false, my eyes and say to you:
“This is what you are.”
Listen
how the barren earth opens
and everything trembles in our cold hands.
***
SEE, THEY RETURN
Perhaps it will be the warm touch of another flesh.
Or the same sun of another summer.
Not the rock, proud, of History
nor the sick prayer of infinity.
It will be something else.
Because They, the bringers of misery,
tired of eternity,
perhaps dream.
And perhaps it is happening now,
that a being orders its own soul without permission,
that with its worn language
and a handful of dust makes its realm.
Only now, in this instant,
perhaps it occurs
that someone says alone what ends
without pronouncing its name,
without disturbing the leaves.
Someone
with fear or with shame,
will name life.
It will be, at last, now:
we will tell of the eternal what dies:
we will move the gods to compassion.