It is a book that gathers three decades of poems and new verses. More than anything, it asserts poetry as a resistance to loss and as a workshop where meaning is repaired.
At Zenda we present five poems fromTaller de ausencias (El Desvelo), by Imanol Gómez Martín.
*****
Dusty Sonata
Like a Sonata,
but in lowercase,
with a very slow gait
I keep unearthing from memory
small fragments, almost in ruins.
The mere touch of my verses
can bruise them,
yet their nearness,
the science that shapes
the artifices of my dreams
strengthens them.
They are the building that houses what I am:
memory, music of a dream
and of the future;
dusty sonata,
three movements,
stages of a life
that fades away, almost,
in the flow of the poem.
*
Damned Poet
A vocation of suicides, aiming to hold
the trace of light in syllables of shadow.
J.L. Panero.
He proceeds in search of his name
among the forgotten corpses of poetry.
He advances, by memory, over ancient verses,
experiences of other dream-algebras,
poetic chiromancies,
lifeblood without measuring their reach
that make him fall to his knees in no-man’s land
because his home is the void that counsels
the eviction of the poem,
his dwelling is a lie of literary figure
that wraps and wounds him,
because his word is ash
and indeed he does not advance,
only the dream accompanies him toward his death.
*
Penelope
Thread by thread she weaves on the loom of fate
the poem that is not meant to be written.
Letter by letter it fuses with dust
and in the millennial night unravels
its wrinkles in the genesis of a word
to illuminate the page that repeats
in the warmth of a chimera.
*
Gazes Are Superfluous
Gazes are superfluous
nor what to say of the words
the sounds, the rustle of the leaves
the strange scent of the river.
Everything is superfluous,
only knowing it matters,
to know the reach,
to feel the strength, the arboreal heat
in the presence of desire.
Even life itself is superfluous
so that no one may recount
the greatness you have lived
or the dream that was denied to you.
*
Taller de ausencias
To my Uncle Paco, in memoriam.
An absence carved into the skin
of the page you will never read.
Seeing the other and sharing
the passion and the flirtation that suffocates
the arrogant rag of culture.
“Now I understand Kant,” you said
and gladly I wrote a poem
already written by Robert Nye.
The agreement to live a philosopher’s life
was settled as if another life could have been lived.
Now that your dreams are shattered
we shed our skin
and the pages wait no longer
for the touch of your nicotine-stained fingers
for they are fodder for memory
of your distinct memory.
…………………………………
Life is a workshop
a workshop of absences,
where memory repairs
(with deceit)
the presence of those already gone
and weaves in its loom
the forgetting of names.
……………………………………………………………………..
Some dreams wear away, pure old ones
or, almost always, from not attempting them,
and the fossilized soul of weariness
like an alchemy of a rigorous desire where aged velvets
and a repentant poem gather.
All absences, under the vertigo of thought,
have no name,
and the inertia of time
does not rest its gaze upon them.
The gaze whose duration measures
the ending of these lines.
***
Author: Imanol Gómez Martín. Title: Taller de ausencias. Publisher: El Desvelo. Purchase: Todostuslibros.