Poetry
Poems and Translations from Michelle Gil-Montero
Author of Attached Houses Shares New Poems, Brings Work of Valerie Mejer Into English
Poet and translator Michelle Gil-Montero.“Flood” appeared in Attached Houses (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013).
Flood
if comfortable, compressible, then a liquid
state like waiting —room silent with watery outline,
bricked-up hearth for a mouth
if silent, then invisible —we start to whisper
when power goes out —char on white candle
from lighting others, new darkness
in the solemn observance of storms
the room is warm though gaunt, like warning and the wait
that follows, oddly comfortable, compressible,
all give or interstitial distances, a field of feathers,
as they say, in a battle
of wills: the room, and rain raining now
through the ceiling —water that has travelled
from an ocean into stone
coping on a shambling wall
Seasons
Spring’s green-gone-
Blue hills
Shine immune
And in that light
Desire is last
To scatter
*
Small white animals
Are quicker
To feel and forget
A glance
With them, we live
A little less
Present
*
End of fall
You are only
Solid
As a bird
And every verb
Arbitrary
Animates dead
Leaves
That dance
Its heat
Of least
Materials
*
No, alone is
Toneless
Tone: The new kitchen
Already lucid with
Disuse
One, one, one, she
Counts
Or is it
None none, undone
Tediously
Ice
Crushed
In the ice-textured
Glass
*
The sign specifies Live
Girls
As flashes of debris to
Clear
Floral box
Spring in the
Dandelions
*
Yellows
Weedy ease
Cheek-by-jowl
Blooms of rip-gut
Brome
I try
July and
All the shallow seeds burn
*
Hard-
Lived water
In the harbor
You hold
Still
So clouds move
Over you
Where am I
In relation I am pacing
Myself
*
I can never read
Bataille while eating
Or break an egg
Cleanly in one hand
On sad days
Anything reads
As an ethic
Is the broken
Egg less
Naked
Than the
Shell
More innocent
Than the hand
*
It snows
A filling meal
A thin line of pat sparrows
A fire
A failure to fit into that scent
Murky pink of sweated sugar
What if you love something
You can only own
By arson
We are wakeful
It leaves
A grave circle
In speech
A secret speed
*
Voices age
Husked, othered
Equally by nudity
And cover
Is it richer
The kiss through
Cloth though
Lucid and unconfused
Wet bag of fruit
Last of the season
The Minimal
1
Whitewash, the flash stays
You ask the shape, and I say
Opaque, latent
The weight of snow
Null bulk
Buckling—We talk
As a dream
Confesses itself, all at once
Then slowly
Into the ether
Of the other and out the
Mouth, proud of its
Speech
2
I sleep in a staged house
Afraid to touch
A thing, caress
The head of heather
Hair, glittering and ready
To collapse as ash
3
Every wall is
A mirror, more a nickel-
Scratched ticket
Than a faceted portrait —
Little piles, grit silver
Wherever
The geometry
Shifts,
Settling into the real
Translated poems from This Blue Novel by Valerie Mejer Caso.
XIV
Something burns in the sky.
The tide goes out, and the house surfaces.
Its skin, quicklime, drips with sweat.
And though it rains, the lions keep back.
The windows, like scars, dare you to touch
the house as you would touch a body.
Ash spreads a sheet from room to room,
dust of letters dispossessed of thought and leopard spots.
I lean my head on something sturdier than foam
and close my eyes like the others.
Behind our eyelids, we dig for a flag inside a tulip
while Dido’s lament drowns in the dining room.
The house, once under the sea,
is now sucked dry like a thirsty mouth,
and ink from the burned books
floods my bloodstream.
Something burns in the sky.
Net fashioned from ash knitted to wind
sinks and sifts for shipwreck,
and among the drowned: bones, necklace beads,
oil lamp flames that lit dinner.
I watch my grandmother copy Goyas:
I see her paint vicious muzzles on dogs,
I see the canvas where witches float in oil,
I see the bullet factory behind the blue mountain,
I see the caged owl, the coven,
and grisly details in the inquisitors’ eyes,
I see a duchess at manifold stages
of her life, I see castaways,
I see how their tiny fingers are slow to form,
I see a refined old woman paper the dining room
in paintings, like mirrors, plotting the coordinates
of a continent lost when you blow.
On the walls, ash attempts the nurse’s calligraphy,
it letters what spreads in my grandmother’s body,
name of the tree that tosses its seeds
to the dirt of its own organs
and sows death, fruit that ripens juiceless.
The house sails through the tunnels of November.
Ship that travels intact
with padlocks and suit closets,
with flour and operas,
with its library on the porch and window to the street,
with its eleven residents and chess game underfoot.
As it sails, all remains still, like the letters in a novel.
Smoke draws forward.
Scent resting on the calyx infects my nose.
Prayers are waves as the house drifts
in the bay of which everyone dreams.
Moorings now loose,
the ship sinks
where no one has ever died before,
where the only world is the rose,
where it reeks of mothballs,
and ash does not exist.
We wake up.
Tide descends and discovers the house.
Sweat coats its skin, quicklime,
and though it rains, the lions draw near.
Something burns in the sky.
XVII
She carved coordinates into her body,
north and south of a parasoled lady.
She spread flesh on this grid like a beekeeper dressing
a honeycomb in skin, exact and luminous.
Work was her summer clock
until the sun tumbled off its stilts
and she discarded her bare-spined copy of El quitasol.
An undone valley still encircles a young girl,
fan in hand.
XVIII
Luz fell down the stairs
and landed at the feet of little Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga
on whom she had painted a red suit and fleshy mouth,
three cats lurking in the background,
sparrow cage, and pet thrush.
My grandmother’s blood speckled her name,
and a cherry stain, the final touch, slurred across
the age of nobility: two years and eight months.
At my grandmother’s bedside
I kept close watch for death,
but it came anyway one November,
years later.
Esta novela azul
XIV
Algo se quema en el cielo.
La marea desciende y descubre la casa.
Sobre su piel de cal se extiende un sudor
y aunque llueve, los leones están lejos.
Las ventanas como cicatrices te hacen tocar
la casa como quien toca un cuerpo.
La ceniza tiende su sábana de cuarto en cuarto,
polvo de letras despojado de ideas y sin manchas de leopardo.
Reposo mi cabeza en eso que es más que la espuma
y cierro los ojos como todos ellos.
Detrás de los párpados buscamos una bandera en un tulipán
mientras el lamento de Dido se ahoga en el comedor.
La casa que estuvo debajo del mar
se seca como la boca del sediento
y la tinta de los libros que se quemaron
se derrama en mi sangre.
Algo se quema en el cielo.
Red hecha de nudos entre la ceniza y el viento
que se hunde y pesca los restos del naufragio
y entre ellos sus huesos, cuentas de un collar,
luces del candil que alumbraba la cena.
Veo a mi abuela copiando Goyas:
la veo pintar hocicos de perros que se muerden,
veo el cuadro donde flotan brujas de óleo,
veo la fabricación de las balas con la montaña azul al fondo,
veo al búho en su jaula, veo el aquelarre
y los temibles detalles en los ojos de los inquisidores,
veo una duquesa en varios momentos
de su vida, veo a los náufragos,
veo cómo tardan en formarse sus minúsculos dedos,
veo cómo una anciana distinguida tapiza el corredor de pinturas
como espejos y con esto traza las coordenadas
de un continente que se retira al soplar.
En los muros la ceniza dibuja la caligrafía de las enfermeras,
escribe el nombre de lo que crece en el cuerpo de mi abuela,
el nombre del árbol que extiende sus semillas
en la tierra de sus órganos
y siembra la muerte, fruta que madura sin jugo.
La casa zarpa en los túneles de noviembre.
Nave que avanza intacta
con los trajes en los armarios y con todos sus candados,
con su harina y sus óperas,
con su biblioteca en el porche y su ventana a la calle,
con sus once habitantes y el ajedrez de sus pisos.
Zarpa con todo inmóvil como las letras en una novela.
El humo avanza tenaz,
el olor que reposa en el cáliz invade mi nariz.
Las oraciones son olas mientras la casa se aleja
sobre esa bahía con la que todos sueñan.
Ya sueltas las amarras,
la nave se hunde
donde nadie nunca ha muerto,
donde el único mundo es la rosa,
donde huele a naftalina,
y la ceniza no existe.
Despertamos
la marea desciende y descubre la casa,
sobre su piel de cal se extiende un sudor
y aunque llueve, los leones se acercan.
Algo se quema en el cielo.
XVII
Ella trazaba coordenadas en el fondo de su cuerpo,
norte y sur de una mujer con sombrilla.
Cubría de carne la cuadrícula como el abejero viste
al panal con una piel exacta y luminosa.
Esta labor era el reloj del verano
hasta que el sol cayó de sus zancos
y de El quitasol dejó una copia con las vértebras expuestas.
Todavía un valle inacabado rodea a una joven
que sostiene un abanico.
XVIII
Luz cayó escaleras abajo,
a los pies del pequeño Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga,
a quien había pintado el traje rojo y la boca carnosa,
tres gatos acechando en el fondo,
la jaula de gorriones y el tordo mascota.
La sangre de mi abuela salpicó su nombre
y una mancha guinda se extendió, toque final, sobre la edad
del noble: dos años y ocho meses.
Al borde de la cama de mi abuela
yo vigilaba que la muerte no se le acercara,
lo haría de todos modos un noviembre
muchos años después.
Michelle Gil-Montero is a poet and translator of contemporary avant-garde Latin American writing. She is the translator of Poetry After the Invention of América: Don't Light the Flower by Chilean writer Andrés Ajens (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), Mouth of Hell by Argentine poet María Negroni, and This Blue Novel by Mexican poet Valerie Mejer (the latter two from Action Books). She is the author of Attached Houses (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013).
