"...because now I'm descending to the anguished
touch of a miner..."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
translated from the Spanish by Keith Ekiss
and Sonia P. Ticas
Declensions of the Monologue
I
I am alone
between my waist and my dress
with a cargo of slight angels
A confused child of sand
Holding their tribes of scent
against a rose profile
II
I arch lightly over
to wear its arteries and my voice
when someone arrives
but now I don't wish to be called,
because I'm descending to the depths of my meagerness
because now I'm descending to the anguished
I descend further
into the immediacies of the air
which hurriedly awaits the letters of its name
I descend even further,
Who shall find me?
I wear my arteries,
I wear my arteries and my voice
so that in a given moment
when someone arrives
and calls to me
and not finding me
I will not have to go and leave my great voice,
and my high heart
completely alone
alone with my entire voice
like those caresses which collapse
alone through my fingers.
seeks a blue canoe
amid my floating hair.
with a pale thread
thirteen pilgrims rush
to the quietest corner of my eyelids.
my heart of flowering stone
to see it,
in a given moment
and calls to me . . .
I fit in the voice of no one,
do not call,
to the satisfied roots of my shadow,
touch of a miner, carrying his half-open flower
on his shoulder
and a big I love you on his belt.
to be born perfect and habitable
(what great haste I have)
I wear this heart of flowering stone,
lightly arched over my heart, to see it,
of flowering stone.
_______________________________________________________________ Reception for a Friend on His Arrival
Tell me
books,
Apart from this,
And without looking at him
about geological mangos
and about a new river
with cities of sound
Tell me as well about the small coast
Tell me if the trees welcomed you unanimously
Summarize it all now that I tremble
now that they offer me publically
and I am like the roses
Sonia P. Ticas is Assistant Professor
of Language
_______________________________________________________________
in Panama
I follow him
and anticipate his voice
because like mist
in uninhabited places
I have a watercolor vocation.
how are the market goods there:
roses,
swallow-shaped bells.
I ask
bordering him with pulp
and the Archangel's longitude.
where recently the day,
like a heavenly two-headed animal,
camped in two aquariums
and filled with fish.
like the time they elected the year's first lark
and the day of flowering.
so gently
behind a swallow,
for a butterfly nude
unsettling the air.
Translators' Bio Notes
Keith Ekiss lives in San Francisco.
His poetry has appeared
in such journals
as Onthebus, The Tule Review and Zyzzyva.
His poems are forthcoming
in Chelsea and in
Place-Landscape-
Culture-Voices
(University of Iowa Press) an anthology
of
Southwest poetry. With Sonia P. Ticas, his translations
of Eunice Odio are
forthcoming in The
Bitter Oleander
(Spring 2003).
and Latin American
Literature at Linfield College, Oregon.