According to the jury of the VI International Poetry Prize Ciudad de Estepona, Helena Mariño “reinvigorates the house she inhabits as a refuge of a we that is genealogy and future. With a writing that does not hide its roots nor the pulse of a language that thinks itself, she builds community and a shared space. She explores the inexhaustibility of the palimpsest that is literature itself, for “every word harbors within it an inexhaustible space” and reading is infinite.”
In Zenda we reproduce five poems from Mira la palabra cómo brilla (Pre-Textos).
***
since this house is no longer
a frame, we have forged a language
in the manner of Sara Gallardo:
animists, hallucinatory, we find
the seeds that had been hiding
in the cracks. then,
in the kitchen, we laid them one
by one on the soil of the pots
and we waited. they are a mystery
on the run, a fragile dialect, something
we cannot domesticate.
***
to all the other places we do not
send emissaries: atomized
it would be like sending a closed universe.
better to leave, on the ground, white songs
that lead here. and in case the day comes when we must
leave, we leave signs of life: not a pedestal that closes
the conversation but an altar,
not a gesture but a newly born word
not a library but a vast palimpsest,
an artifact, a mound of footprints,
the echo of a rave, a parenthesis,
several ghosts saying: come
to occupy this house.
***
in 1995 my favorite poet writes an anthropology of water.
she says she has come here to record desire with her camera.
I envy her unfathomable corpus of references the time for the
study
to know how to turn every quotation into an artifact
closer to sex than to academia.
in the book matter and verb are indissolubly bound
there are borders of sweat, thirst, some ancient names.
in the book life is imitation, imitation is writing
a small stream the road to old age
the words are so brusque.
I am not old yet but the veins in my wrists are a bed
that branches.
in the book desire is a moving thing
before what remains there is what does not endure remains.
loss and death are a normal danger in the course
of an investigation, say the anthropologists.
desire grows round like a peach
which then overflows and rots and from the stains becomes a map.
capturing desire is as difficult as trying to describe your hands.
desire is a little bell that sounds under the water.
every hydrology treatise is a book about sex
that guides pilgrims to a shore and watches.
***
I was leaning against the fountain
she looked too young to bear
that face of sorrow.
I wanted to embrace her
her shoes were full of droplets
an archipelago
the not-knowing of the future
the sadness of the radical struggle
against candor.
***
the latest project to adapt the public space in my neighborhood
has installed new irrigation manholes in the gardens.
metallic sprouts rise from the ground among yellow daisies
and we watch them overflow,
generating small lakes.
so fertile they flood the earth instead of nourishing it
death writes itself alone.
we are together we are the same
the manholes and us in this space
sharp dematerialized prowling
surrendered
like Blanca Varela’s gaze
in the poems of Animal Concert.
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Author: Helena Mariño. Title: Look at the Word How It Shines. Publisher: Pre-Textos. Available at: Todos tus libros.