Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts

Monday, June 13, 2016

The Sieve

for Linda
The word will never be uttered without feel.
Darkness, in another hemisphere echoes distance–
accommodates a cloud of unknown named pain.
A juxtaposed stomach, half life & half death is divide
by a shadow so cold [winds] Deep and Sterile.
The passing of compound moments utterly sieve.

Gather and embrace and clasp. Clutch the sieve.
Silence draws a cold nip at a soul– jars a feel.
A gap between her & I marks a distance.                                 [two pillars]
Unintentional and acute, memory summons pain.
But as words catalyze to be spoken, a divide
births a dark light through the womb senescent; sterile.

How does a man approach what is sterile?
A negative; the man caught and clasped in a sieve.
Death, shadow, cold, and the dark light all feel–
they collaborate and construct an immense distance.
Further, Farther, Far– the Farthest destroys pain.
The pain follows them into an abyss, a divide.

Snow falls over the shadow. The memory is Divide.
A winter front, gray and threatening sterile–
but heed not– the deed and spoiled gathers in the sieve,
clever to avoid a breakdown, shifty for a false feel.
Tracks of a husbands feet shoveling piles of distance
numb his unsheathed hands, naked heart, disparate prints, pain.

And we settle because the depth pocked with pain
is a label which severs unitary emptiness that's divide.
Caper to the vicious circle, a cyclical death sterile,
contained and frozen by the pure and holy sieve.
We drag our claw as the abyss tugs us from the feel.
Now we flip or flop in favor of the uncouth Distance.

Shadow and Darkness remain and persist in Distance.
One deceives the other and reciprocates a universal pain.
Exhausted, life simplified in surrender, Death is divide.
If only our Mothers or Fathers had been equally sterile,
then all Sons and Daughters could have escaped the great sieve.
No loss for word, no need to respond, no need to continue, no need to feel.

Distance sterilizes the feeling,
much like time in the dark divides all
that settles. A silty pain putting the sieve to use.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Poking at Memory: A Conversation with Rocío Cerón and Anna Rosenwong | World Literature Today


During the month of June and trickling into July of this year, I had the opportunity to interview Rocío Cerón author of Diorama, and translator Anna Rosenwong. Fortunately, World Literature Today was gracious enough to run it for their column Translation Tuesday this past week. The link above will take you to the interview.

I have now read through the book of poems 4 times. Over the months I have been browsing it's pages from time to time in search of the stubborn melodies and rhythms that will not leave me and contrarily have nestled into my mind hoping to find them again amongst the stanzas and lines. Diorama seems like a hallucinogenic journey with no end. It has not ended for me despite putting it down. The pauses, the imagery, and the allusions are palpable and visionary to the happening of daily life here in Buenos Aires. My notion is that this could be said for other places in Latin America and possibly in regard to other metropolitan cities where migration is constant and growing; not to exclude the spaces where the transitory individual is commonplace (That is if all spaces are not so). Honing in on the liminality of the book's landscape, both political and social, it is important that the reader notice the rich language and potent call to listen. This is enhanced when Cerón invites the Paraguayan writer, and friend, Cristino Bogado to translate a repeated refrain into the Guaraní, extending the book deeper into a frontal reality of Latin American that is so often boxed in as anamorphic due to generalizations and misinformed interpretations. Confusing and hard to capture its coherence at times, the modern urban setting of Latin America is difficult to sketch, interpret, or process, much like the first couple readings of Diorama. However, Cerón exercises her style to corral the elements of such a world by transposing it all to paper by virtue of her visual and symphonic poetics. To the readers' excitement, they will notice that Anna Rosenwong's translation is peerless and nothing short of honest, careful, and symphonic in and of itself.

 As Rocío says, "[Diorama]is a listening book; that´s to say, a book that is influenced by the voices, images, and truths of a nation, a continent. Thus the voices, like in a symphony concert, mix; they meet in a polyphonic composition."