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Reading from Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus festival, 2012.
Translated from the Spanish by Jen Hofer:
from America
Their name was Krusevac, now Cruz. The buildings perspired. It was an island or a mountain littered with shacks. It’s a men’s affair. The women stored potatoes, constructed the world. An affair of lustreless traces, so it was thought. Sweetly melodious landscapes with accordion in the background. Cleverness. Prow accumulating salt. Take my arm, sever the ligament: I need to lose my taste for ajvar. The birds hushed at their step. Oar. In the depths, the fish intuiting. Some graves hold entire families. But these women are sage. Al the tongues of Europe disappeared. Earth. Apple candy doesn’t smell live cloves. Each letter spells a sojourn. These women are my mothers. From that day forward – America – the skin of my cheeks a prairie.
Камень. Камены.
A swan engages in self-reflection.
The gardens of Leto do not commemorate Niobe.
Riven, the vernal ice drifts on the Never River.
Eva my daughter has a fever. Her face looks thinner.
She ate bread and butter my daughter.
She wants me to lie next to her, so that she may grab onto the sides of my head
and drift off to sleep.
Vater. Water.
She wakes up, goes to peepee. I hold her over the bowl.
I try to wrap her in a bathrobe. No, I’m schwitzing. I do not need it.
I’m not cold, I’m wet.
She sneezes, a Popel hanging out of her nose. Der Popel, but die Pappel.
Ich sah meine Pappel, and so on.
She “reads” Asterix and is delighted when I tell her that Ave is Eva
spelled backwards.
Papa, says Eva holding a brownish apple, schmeiss this weg. I schmeiss it weg.
We live in Berlin.
Rome has fallen, ye see it lying
Heaped in undistinguished ruin:
Nature is alone undying.
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