This poetry collection is born in that place where everything seems to end, and yet something begins to breathe beneath the wreckage. Like a whale slowly sinking, the book traverses devastation and uprooting, and there, where the body falls and everything seems to break, another form of life begins.
At Zenda we offer five poems from Whale Fall (Olifante), by Carmen Aliaga.
***
Suddenly, the skin
turns to wool for us
and the bones shrink,
soften
until they take on a cotton texture.
Life, treacherously, sharpening its claws.
A ball of yarn that rolls
across the carpet.
***
Pasture of brutality,
I have annihilated the time
of thirst and hunger,
the prism of this body,
wounded animal.
Lagging animal and on alert.
Compassionate animal in retreat.
Pasture of brutality,
pasture of brutality,
I have crossed the shore of delirium,
devastated path,
and I have said:
“Not to be,
no
I will be.”
***
Always hanging from the shoulder,
the indispensable key
to the cave,
I hid from the light
and from others.
I wanted to invent fire,
to understand rotation,
inertia,
perennial matter
and the ephemeral.
I bet on knowing
the origin of yes
and that of negation.
I wanted to face the eye
of my destiny.
But I learned that the world
was breaking in two for me
and there was room for no other
than to go on with what I had.
***
I wanted to know gold
its value and its weight,
to measure gravity,
stranded on that ship
of survival.
I wanted to know the sea,
to love without restrictions,
the depth of that well,
where the mud reached
to the jaw.
I wanted to know water
its salt
and its hardness,
but I could only
keep holding the world up,
without squeezing it.
***
I leave my cave open,
my shadow on the wall,
my light in the mirror
of deformity.
I leave my broken bones
in floating boxes,
the abrupt surge
of memory.
I also leave my flesh
scarce and bitten,
the weight on the scales
of obsession.
I leave the confused day
and the thick afternoons,
the mystery and the flight
in the dark hands
of the night.
—————————————
Author: Carmen Aliaga. Title: Whale Fall. Publisher: Olifante. Sales: Todos tus libros.
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