Five Cubans
published in The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, edited by Mark Weiss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)
Eugenio Florit (1903–1999)
Poets Alone in Manhattan
The Cuban poet Alcides Iznaga came to visit New York in August 1959. On his return to Cienfuegos he sent
me a poem, “Estamos solos en Manhattan” [We’re alone in Manhattan], to which I answered with these lines:
My dear Alcides Iznaga:
it’s true that neither Langston Hughes nor I was at home.
Because Langston, who lives in the black quarter,
also goes downtown.
And I, when you phoned,
or rather, passed by my house,
was far away in the country,
I who live among whites.
But up here
it comes to the same whether you live
on 127th Street
or at 7 Park Avenue.
Here we all go about lost and alone,
all unknown
amid the noise
of subway trains and fire trucks,
and sirens of ambulances
trying to rescue suicides
who throw themselves from a bridge into the river,
or from their window to the street,
or who open the gas valves,
or take a hundred sleeping pills
—because, since they haven’t been found yet,
what they want is to sleep and to forget everything--
to forget that no one remembers them,
that they’re alone, terribly alone among the multitude.
You see, I ran into Langston Hughes around the end of August
at a party at the Pen Club,
very courteous and formal
and all dressed in blue.
And then the years pass, and at most we might
exchange books: “For my dear friend . . . ”
“Recuerdo muy afectuoso . . . ,” etc.
And so we grow old
the black poet
and the white poet,
and the mulatto and the Chinese and every living creature.
As you, my friends in Cienfuegos,
will grow old,
you who on that unforgettable day in February (1955)
took me to the Castillo de Jagua
where I trembled with emotion upon seeing
a vicaria among the stones.
The thing is,
my dear Alcides Iznaga,
that here there are no vicarias,
nor Castillo de Jagua,
nor are my poets with me
nor my palm trees (“Las palmas, ay . . . ”)
nor the blue waters of Cienfuegos Bay
nor those of Havana.
Here the sad lazy waters
of the two rivers circling Manhattan . . .
You, my dear Alcides,
came
searching for us in New York, this city where
no one knows anyone . . .
Where
all of us, each one,
are nothing but a drop of water,
a mote of dust, like those
rising sadly from the chimneys.
Sadly, in a manner of speaking. Thank God,
I still keep the words serene
with which to greet the morning sun
that rises—when it rises—before my window.
And if it doesn’t rise, then to greet the wind, the air, the mist and clouds;
to salute this world in which we live
with these the words we write.
And to give thanks to God for the day and the night
and for having a word of our own, here, where no one knows us.
23 October 1959
Game
Nothing more than the voice on the mountain
or maybe the mountain over the sea
or perhaps the sea above the abyss.
It could just as well be
the sea over the abyss
as the mountain over the sea
or the voice on the mountain.
Strange
the serene song rises in the evening
and the green quiet trembling over the green,
and the disquiet set in the deep
background
where the movement from abyss to star
must end.
And in the middle of the road
like a column of wind
halted in the thin air,
there it is:
the voice of the mountain in the song.
Bruges
(Lake of Love)
When the light from above, the gray of today, goes out,
before it dies another light comes up from the ground
that makes the trees green at night,
the swans yellow and the bridges red.
It’s the response of earth, and even of water,
to the absence of sun, barely glimpsed through the rains.
It’s the irregular yes of colors
to the no of sky and the maybe of wind.
The split towers fall to the lake,
steadier in the water than in the air;
everything falls to the lake, lights and reflections,
and even the water remains contained in itself.
We no longer know if walking the edge
we’re merely our own reflection,
and that our truth is underneath the waters.
The Fog
And there in the distance, nothing.
A line of houses one can hardly make out
through the white of snow and sun.
Cloudy is better.
It’s better not to see anything clearly.
It’s better when the city is covered in fog
so as not to see the dirty or sad inside.
Not to see, not to see. Not to notice the people slip
and fall, and get up giving thanks, to whom?
to the good boy, dirty and unkempt, who
is tempted to be charitable and acts on it.
Ah, to act on the temptation to be kind
amid the filthy ground and abandoned newspapers.
To be kind: to say thanks, excuse me, those words
that unintentionally alleviate the sorrow.
But, above all, not to see, not to notice, to stay blind.
To be able to be happy amid the fog.
4 February 1970
* * *
Cintio Vitier (1921– )
Birnam Wood
Thou com’st to use thy tongue; thy story quickly.
Macbeth to the Messenger, act V, scene V
So many things have I seen and yet
they fit on one page, since memory,
like the line of the horizon
which is the only food for my eyes,
can empty itself entirely in forgetfulness.
Everything in Matanzas was the same as Paris,
I mean equal on the scale of twilight.
Sitting there in the park, before the whirling
dances beneath the stars, was to witness respectfully
the vehement romanticizing of a future
that lies spoiled on a Sunday
on Moscow Street. Respect loses degrees
like an unwanted drink, ancient it flies
with the loose robes of the clouds, and the future
of memory that was already present in the glow of the cornet
passes dragging its wing through the cover of shipwreck.
Overblown words. One should say
little things, pins sought along the flagstones, small gestures
of people waiting in parks when they’re
about to turn into spectra of purple.
In any case, pointillism is the love of time.
A painting by Seurat can absorb as much inflammable
material as flew off that Eros
who struck the stones in search of a firefly.
Thus something appears unbidden
out of nothingness, unimagined even by the laws of physics,
without being metaphysical either, something bewitching and wise
slipping into the retentive coolness of the orange groves.
Certainly, lord, I came to use my tongue,
and what I have to tell you is:
through it speaks the errant wood,
nuptial armature of your enemy.
Since the beginning we were destined.
The moisture of life yearns for a language
that industrious time has built
with the very substance of the silent.
The silent roars, whistles, explodes in the thicket
with the general thunder of warbling.
The silent articulating its impossible
dialogue with the blank pages . . .
In a corner
of the Pitti Palace gardens
you can see all sorts of snacks,
and were other examples of sweetness needed,
without resorting to Giorgione’s thinking peach,
you could wake up again in New Orleans,
the sycamores dripping on a lucid porch
rented out indiscriminately to the voracious.
It’s not a matter of analogies or resonances,
there the misery starts where the musician finishes
who stretched his violin to the syllable of fire.
This is what it’s about, the fire wants to speak
even using a dull pencil and a sheet of paper
that vaguely pretends to be transparent:
not because of being fire, since the trogon likewise
flutters through the leaves with veiled fame, never likewise,
eye, blood, stone, son, want to
cross the limit of their installations
that are smoking ruins leveled by the infantry.
Nature says: to see me, go through me, oh, to be seen,
would only be worth the trouble in the act of giving birth to myself
projected in a moving body that carries me to the other place.
The plunge lasts for worlds and you are at your post
in Fort Belvedere or on the moon in the water of the San Juan.
Choose whether to remain on that unspeaking shore
or to chastely fecundate the only wife.
Then the snack and its words are a face,
the journeys are one journey, the fire gives light to a man, let us begin.
The silent bursts into speech, using language
that rose from the mist on the water,
like a sun splitting into a rainbow.
Out of charity and need the tongue
says it all helped by the hand,
fiercely supported by the eye
where the concave adjusts to the convex.
All that’s said acquires another substance.
The wood has started walking toward the castle
of diabolical silence and cursed blood.
Life is not the tale told by an idiot
but the march of the wood and the wheeling of the stars
in the voice of the messenger who isn’t done.
That is my story, the story of my tongue.
Life is that, the tongue of the story.
Succumb, infernal power, usurping and silent,
drowned by the wood. I will keep proclaiming.
What begins had already begun,
the heron insinuates itself like a flower of justice.
History is the miracle of nature
when Birnam Wood begins to walk
in the siege of the castle the devil rented .
But the wood had always been advancing toward the castle.
A tiny destination, corrupted
by the enjoyment of secret venetian blinds,
suddenly equals the Battle of San Romano
painted by Uccello as if he were returning
infernal history to the earth’s equations.
The mathematical earth, the flute-playing earth.
“Water, ammonia, carbonic acid, float now,
bathed in solar rays: to scorn that mist
would be to deprive the young star of its most essential ornament,”
says Teilhard smitten.
From that nostalgic mist emerges Attila galloping toward the blue
of little Thérèse of Lisieux. In that mist
the old musicians and I, a child, are playing
the Stabat Mater of Rossini, while the boat
with my brother advances toward the outlet
covered by the blond haze of dawn.
There was no Turner nor Ruskin for the San Juan,
but there was also no Milanés for the Thames. The complementary
nonexistences nail daybreak with a golden nail.
All that’s needed is a push for the boat.
We advance in the mist that floats over everything,
mother of the petiole’s heart and the tiger’s eye,
disguised with the branches of the immemorial wood that advances
in the siege of the castle, and we don’t know
if now we’re troops armed to the teeth
or the country bride on the morning of her wedding.
January 1971
* * *
Fayad Jamís (1930–1988)
The Wedding in the Anthill
Fiesta of the pine tree, the baker and the newborn cicada! It’s the worms who prepare the barrels of moonshine. My bride sings and dances wrapped in red firelight. Let’s celebrate the great wedding in the anthill by my hearth. Fiesta in the endless night, over the burning pasture of the world. Courage to the lamb that takes fright before the fierce wall of flames licking the sky ever higher as frogs and bootblacks throw onto the coals the well-washed bodies of the banker, the soldier and the doctor! To your health, oh lucky, red, pure, joyous anthill by my hearth!
Wanderer of the Dawn
The pale Paris morning grows over my shoulders
after the long night my love this breeze
Leaves the color of autumn honey gliding through the streets
on the sidewalks the autumn leaves over the beggars’ heads
Still they sleep a woman has risen picked up a beret
by a sleeper’s feet and covered his face
The tenderness of that woman under her black rags
like the pale flower of the day like the dove
fluttering over the Seine of smoke of glass of silver
That’s how daybreak is here I tell you now that it’s autumn
that’s how the dawn is the city is dead its bones can be touched
and no one will say anything the police sleep their ears of cork
the laws sleep misery dozes I walk I walk
first man in this new day as if the city were my wife
and I watched her sleeping naked the sky rising from her back
That’s how Paris is I tell you sometimes I dream that I’m going through a dead world
after the last bomb even hope dead
I don’t understand much but I feel a bit like Robinson Crusoe
the Robinson of this beautiful terrible great city called Paris
Cats emerge from everywhere good morning the garbage bins are full
broken toys rotten fruit suits papers torn apart
papers where oblivion has left its dark scar
The world civilization all that has died the cats and I survive
Facing one of these bridges I shall choose my home
maybe that one with the red curtain in the window
or the other that comes forward as though it wished to greet me good morning
But no it’s not true behind all those gray walls are men
who breathe snore and dream
men who maybe recall a cry lost in the turquoise valley of the centuries
men who are thinking perhaps about the new models of automobiles
about their work about love maybe about death
That black spot swept along by the current is a cardboard box
I thought it was a tortoise I thought it was a lawyer
and it’s nothing more than a cardboard box three leaves floating around it
like three hearts of honey three figures of autumn
The trees emerge from the river like smoke from cigars
Another dove flutters about its white shadow over the gray water
The urinals have the cunning beauty of certain churches in Castile
I enter them to do something while I think
while I walk my love which is to say no one the world those leaves
The traffic signals give the go-ahead to the cats to the breeze
these amber lights on the brow of the pale day
Last night they were talking about the war always the war
corpses foam of eternity corpses
but not everyone know how sweet is freedom for example at these hours
when the milkman’s white wagon follows his white beasts
A girl from Israel was talking to me about her country’s youth
she has no religion she loves Paris she loves the world
tomorrow we’ll all have the same bronze face and speak the same language
tomorrow although you may not want it mister general mister businessman mister glasses of wire and ash
soon the new life the new man will build their cities
on top of your bones and mine on top of the dust of Notre-Dame
In the first bakery to open I will buy a large loaf
like I used to do in my country except that now my friends are not with me
and I’m no longer twenty
Then I would have seen all those shadows in another color
I would have whistled I would have dragged with me the memory of a flaxen-haired girl
In the end all those things are left behind
now it’s more important to work in order to live
Some birds begin to sing the dead leaves fall
I’m going away from the river the boats the white bridges
these buildings look like they might fall on my head
they’re becoming hunchbacked with the passing of the centuries
the Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche inspires terrible stories
But it’s better to carry on it’s dawn it’s dawn
hands in pockets keep going keep going
Two butchers hack with an axe at a side of beef
it’s not fun but I like to watch
my soul is still a bit of a butcher it’s 1956
Tomorrow maybe it won’t be like this maybe there won’t be butchers or executioners
my heart part executioner and part hanged man
your heart your heart will be dust water wind
for the new sunflowers
each seed like a sleeping bee
The pale day was white now it’s turning yellow
some chimneys seem about to catch fire
A soldier passes with an enormous suitcase
on his way to the Gare de Lyon on his way to Egypt death
A woman passes on a bicycle she is going to work
when the sun is knee-high to her like wheat
every day all her life she goes to work
A truck passes loaded with wine with a clatter with dawn
I’m already on the Boulevard Saint-Germain I’m looking in the bookstore windows
Some day I’ll buy a good dictionary the complete works of Rimbaud
lots of books best not to speak of that
Beggars are sleeping everywhere that one looks like a child
between his head and the cement sidewalk there is nothing but a frozen sheet of metal
I feel like drinking my breakfast coffee I’m hungry and thirsty
the yellow dawn tastes bad in my mouth
Paris is beginning to awaken I’m not Robinson anymore
just a foreigner a ghost
a man who has not slept
a wanderer in the city the autumn the dawn
while my love must be gazing at the summits of Peru
or the enameled sky of China
I don’t know my feet are tired that’s all there is
After having loved to live the new day
is beautiful
The same flame burns in the city and the heart.
Charlie and the Moon
In memory of Escardó
In the slums of South London or Bayamo
the cats and the moon play on the rooftops
There’s always someone to throw a stone at them always
someone who wants to take four shots at the moon but also
there are men who noticing it above the garbage bin
run down the stairs to the corner bar
to put a record on the victrola a slightly misty number
that could be the sweetness of spring or the tenderness of eyes forever lost
Sometimes a beggar staggers along with a piece of the moon
on his head surrounded by flies
The local kids shout at him:
“Hey, king, nice silver crown you’re wearing!
We’re going to buy you another bottle!”
And the beggar
after dancing a slow waltz
falls at last onto the dirty mirror of the sidewalk
At his side the moon shivers like a chilly cat.
In the slums of the North on the beaches of Cuba
or in a ramshackle doorway in the Vallecas district in Madrid
when someone takes his little dog to pee or when someone hangs out
his only shirt in the night wind
the moon appears over an electrical pole
and then someone begins to sing
“I’m no longer so alone
in this world . . . ”
In a kitchen two slices of fish are frying
The smell of onions makes the police turn round coming and going
through the street while they wait for the first
melancholy-eyed thief to emerge
from a dark window with his enormous sack
Charlie’s whiskers twitch like two furious mosquitoes
but the owner of the fish won’t let him pass
All those walls all those corridors
stairways rising toward the dust and the night
are full of human beings who want to eat and live
in spite of the spiderwebs or the knife in the back
they want to live
Even the twisted bones of the old folks
they want to live
orange flames over the grass yellow rivers of autumn
Right now the moon slips down over the heads of the wretched
and a plane zooms past toward other continents or toward the beaches of emptiness
The children are jumping on an empty bottle
on a rag doll on the bright red
face of all the tyrants in the world the children are jumping
little birds of the drizzle birds of the sun
They who could go as far as Saturn
on the neck of a giraffe
They who know how to build a city
from pieces of glass and clay
The captains of empty lots the conquerors
of great prehistoric beasts
Those who sometimes keep in their coffers
all that is needed to buy an ice cream
Charlie is there dreaming among the children
His shoes stumble in every direction
Charlie is there the crickets have stopped their screeching
Twelve doves fly out of the moon
and flutter above the chorus of playing children
until one settles on Charlie’s left foot
“Hurray for nights in the backyard hurray for the crystal doves!
Hurray for the smell of the trees hurray for strawberry ice cream!”
They’re going to bury him in a pasture
that other fellow they’re going to crown
him over there with eyes like grains of corn
they’re going to sit in an electric chair
It’s already divvied up
and the man who only feeds on shadow is not the man who has ten factories
working for his joy
and the man who was born with an enormous nose
is not the man who hides behind the white flame of a woman
Up there cats sniff
the garbage bins
The chimneys send out no smoke
the record player on the corner is going to burst
like a giant toad
while an old wooden throat
says that everything everything’s going to start over
And the madman in the house across the street?
and the girls with necks like the milky way?
and my cigar that won’t stop burning?
Charlie shows up down there again
and begins to dance to the sound of a mambo
while the moon sweet lamp of the slums emerges from his hat
* * *
Heberto Padilla (1932–2000)
Discourse on Method
If after the bombing is over,
walking on the grass that can grow just as well
among the ruins
as in the hat on your bishop’s head,
you can imagine that you’re not seeing
what’s going to be right before your eyes,
or that you’re not hearing
what you’ll have to hear for a long time yet:
or (still worse)
you think that cleverness or good judgment will be enough
to keep you from finding
only a demolished armchair and a heap of broken books,
when you come home one day
I advise you to run at once,
to look for a passport,
some countersign,
a sickly child, anything
that could give you an alibi for a sluggish police force
(because it’s all
peasants and farmhands now)
and to get away once and for all.
Escape by the back stairs
(so that no one will see you).
Don’t take anything.
It’ll be of no use--
not an overcoat, or a glove, or a family name,
not a gold bar, or a vague title.
Don’t waste time
hiding jewelry in the walls
(they’ll find it anyway).
Don’t start keeping manuscripts in the cellar
(the military will find them later).
Be wary of the most loyal maid.
Don’t hand the keys to the chauffeur, don’t entrust
the gardener with the dog.
Don’t fool yourself with news from the shortwave radio.
Stop before the tallest mirror in the living room, calmly,
and contemplate your life,
look at yourself as you are now
because this will be the last time.
Now they’re taking the barricades from the parks.
Now the assailants of power are mounting the podium.
Now the dog, the gardener, the chauffeur, the maid
are in the crowd applauding.
Prayer for the Turn of the Century
We who have always glanced with irony and indulgence
at the motley collection of things from the turn of the century: the buildings,
and the children
fettered in dark suits.
We for whom the turn of the century was at most
an engraving and a French prayer.
We who believed that after a hundred years what was left was
a black bird holding a grandmother’s hairnet.
We who have seen the collapse of parliaments
and the patchy ass of liberalism.
We who learned to distrust famous myths
and to whom the idea of a parlor with candelabras
a curtain
and a Louis XV chair
seems absolutely impossible
(uninhabitable).
We, children and grandchildren now of melancholy terrorists
and superstitious scientists,
we who know that today we commit the error
that someone else will condemn tomorrow.
We, living the final years
of this century,
stroll about, incapable of improvising an unplanned
movement;
gesticulate in a space more restricted
than in the lines of an engraving;
put on dark suits
as if we were going to attend a parliament,
while the candelabras flare in the cornice
and the black birds
break the hairnet of this girl with the hoarse voice.
Cuban Poets Don’t Dream Anymore
Cuban poets don’t dream anymore
(not even at night).
They get up to close the door so they can write alone
when suddenly the wood creaks;
the wind pushes them adrift;
some hands catch them by the shoulders,
turn them around,
set them face to face with other faces
(sunk in swamps burning with napalm)
and the world flows above their mouths
and the eye is obliged to see, to see, to see.
Poetics
Tell the truth.
At least tell your truth.
And after
let anything happen:
let them tear up your beloved page,
let them knock down your door,
let people
crowd around your body
as if you were
a miracle or a corpse.
The Place of Love
Always, past your shoulders I see the world.
It sparkles beneath the storm clouds.
It’s a piece of rotted wood, an old lantern
swaying as if against the current.
The world that our bodies
(our solitude) cannot abolish,
a century of sappers and frogmen
under your pillow,
in the place where your shoulders
become softer, more fragile.
Always, past your shoulders
(we can never avoid it now)
there is a list of the missing,
a village destroyed,
a child trembling.
* * *
Belkis Cuza Malé (1942– )
The Cinderellas
We are the cinderellas.
Mister Botticelli painted the three
fairy godmothers for us.
We are not innocent.
The Prince has never kissed us.
We have not set foot in his chamber,
nor licked his belly.
We live in the kitchen,
our moon is the fire.
Our feet are enormous;
a long bath would suit us nicely.
We go around in ragged skirts,
our hair disheveled
and we eat stale bread.
We are not innocent.
Because we were black, ugly and whores
they booed us at the Miss Universe pageant.
But we (the foulmouthed) cry out
merde! to the king’s ass
and merde! to his ministers,
though they rage at our stench.
Pandora’s Box
The street is the danger, but you wander forth
and surprise yourself beside the bronze knocker
of the tall doors. And when you’re about to be heard
committing a gaffe,
a gust of air stops you for an instant,
makes you turn your face and you discover the old woman
standing beside you
with her heavy wicker basket, where her hidden
Pandora’s box sparkles.
You distrust your imagination, you don’t give in
you make way for
time’s arguments
and the mere idea of love.
She continues on her way.
It was only the temptation to offer you everything.
Why were you not tempted by the miracle of curiosity?
Critique of Impure Reason
She opens the door to her house and enters
like a stranger,
as if she were entering the world
by the back door.
On the walls the ship
drawn by her daughter sails,
the laundry bill
hangs from the mainmast.
Her neighbors have decided to get married today
and to borrow her furniture for a while.
She enters her house and starts to write,
she needs to arrange the world somehow,
to create a man for herself,
a nanny for her daughter
and a bit of life for the cats she doesn’t have.
She begins to write,
as if she were before a jury,
she takes out her paper heroines,
because she is a girl who lives alone,
who sleeps alone,
who dances alone.
She is the girl
you need to destroy
in order to feel stronger.
The Navel of the World
In a girl’s belly
there are bites and big scars,
sheep that time has almost erased.
There are bones and posters and strands of men’s hair
and traffic signs;
there are sterilizing pills
and time bombs, pistols, baby teeth,
napalm fire,
leaves and butterflies,
pots of flowers and engagement rings.
The great crimes,
the divorces,
the evictions,
ripen in a girl’s belly.
The navel of the world
is a girl’s belly.
Prospectors,
kings for hire,
chocolate soldiers,
liars,
rapists,
professors of aesthetics,
United States presidents,
violinists,
horse thieves,
married men,
village priests,
swindlers,
provocateurs,
scientists,
doctors,
globetrotters,
judges,
proletarians,
cannibals,
chatterboxes,
drunks,
voyeurs,
stop poking around in girls’ bellies.
published in The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, edited by Mark Weiss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)
Eugenio Florit (1903–1999)
Poets Alone in Manhattan
The Cuban poet Alcides Iznaga came to visit New York in August 1959. On his return to Cienfuegos he sent
me a poem, “Estamos solos en Manhattan” [We’re alone in Manhattan], to which I answered with these lines:
My dear Alcides Iznaga:
it’s true that neither Langston Hughes nor I was at home.
Because Langston, who lives in the black quarter,
also goes downtown.
And I, when you phoned,
or rather, passed by my house,
was far away in the country,
I who live among whites.
But up here
it comes to the same whether you live
on 127th Street
or at 7 Park Avenue.
Here we all go about lost and alone,
all unknown
amid the noise
of subway trains and fire trucks,
and sirens of ambulances
trying to rescue suicides
who throw themselves from a bridge into the river,
or from their window to the street,
or who open the gas valves,
or take a hundred sleeping pills
—because, since they haven’t been found yet,
what they want is to sleep and to forget everything--
to forget that no one remembers them,
that they’re alone, terribly alone among the multitude.
You see, I ran into Langston Hughes around the end of August
at a party at the Pen Club,
very courteous and formal
and all dressed in blue.
And then the years pass, and at most we might
exchange books: “For my dear friend . . . ”
“Recuerdo muy afectuoso . . . ,” etc.
And so we grow old
the black poet
and the white poet,
and the mulatto and the Chinese and every living creature.
As you, my friends in Cienfuegos,
will grow old,
you who on that unforgettable day in February (1955)
took me to the Castillo de Jagua
where I trembled with emotion upon seeing
a vicaria among the stones.
The thing is,
my dear Alcides Iznaga,
that here there are no vicarias,
nor Castillo de Jagua,
nor are my poets with me
nor my palm trees (“Las palmas, ay . . . ”)
nor the blue waters of Cienfuegos Bay
nor those of Havana.
Here the sad lazy waters
of the two rivers circling Manhattan . . .
You, my dear Alcides,
came
searching for us in New York, this city where
no one knows anyone . . .
Where
all of us, each one,
are nothing but a drop of water,
a mote of dust, like those
rising sadly from the chimneys.
Sadly, in a manner of speaking. Thank God,
I still keep the words serene
with which to greet the morning sun
that rises—when it rises—before my window.
And if it doesn’t rise, then to greet the wind, the air, the mist and clouds;
to salute this world in which we live
with these the words we write.
And to give thanks to God for the day and the night
and for having a word of our own, here, where no one knows us.
23 October 1959
Game
Nothing more than the voice on the mountain
or maybe the mountain over the sea
or perhaps the sea above the abyss.
It could just as well be
the sea over the abyss
as the mountain over the sea
or the voice on the mountain.
Strange
the serene song rises in the evening
and the green quiet trembling over the green,
and the disquiet set in the deep
background
where the movement from abyss to star
must end.
And in the middle of the road
like a column of wind
halted in the thin air,
there it is:
the voice of the mountain in the song.
Bruges
(Lake of Love)
When the light from above, the gray of today, goes out,
before it dies another light comes up from the ground
that makes the trees green at night,
the swans yellow and the bridges red.
It’s the response of earth, and even of water,
to the absence of sun, barely glimpsed through the rains.
It’s the irregular yes of colors
to the no of sky and the maybe of wind.
The split towers fall to the lake,
steadier in the water than in the air;
everything falls to the lake, lights and reflections,
and even the water remains contained in itself.
We no longer know if walking the edge
we’re merely our own reflection,
and that our truth is underneath the waters.
The Fog
And there in the distance, nothing.
A line of houses one can hardly make out
through the white of snow and sun.
Cloudy is better.
It’s better not to see anything clearly.
It’s better when the city is covered in fog
so as not to see the dirty or sad inside.
Not to see, not to see. Not to notice the people slip
and fall, and get up giving thanks, to whom?
to the good boy, dirty and unkempt, who
is tempted to be charitable and acts on it.
Ah, to act on the temptation to be kind
amid the filthy ground and abandoned newspapers.
To be kind: to say thanks, excuse me, those words
that unintentionally alleviate the sorrow.
But, above all, not to see, not to notice, to stay blind.
To be able to be happy amid the fog.
4 February 1970
* * *
Cintio Vitier (1921– )
Birnam Wood
Thou com’st to use thy tongue; thy story quickly.
Macbeth to the Messenger, act V, scene V
So many things have I seen and yet
they fit on one page, since memory,
like the line of the horizon
which is the only food for my eyes,
can empty itself entirely in forgetfulness.
Everything in Matanzas was the same as Paris,
I mean equal on the scale of twilight.
Sitting there in the park, before the whirling
dances beneath the stars, was to witness respectfully
the vehement romanticizing of a future
that lies spoiled on a Sunday
on Moscow Street. Respect loses degrees
like an unwanted drink, ancient it flies
with the loose robes of the clouds, and the future
of memory that was already present in the glow of the cornet
passes dragging its wing through the cover of shipwreck.
Overblown words. One should say
little things, pins sought along the flagstones, small gestures
of people waiting in parks when they’re
about to turn into spectra of purple.
In any case, pointillism is the love of time.
A painting by Seurat can absorb as much inflammable
material as flew off that Eros
who struck the stones in search of a firefly.
Thus something appears unbidden
out of nothingness, unimagined even by the laws of physics,
without being metaphysical either, something bewitching and wise
slipping into the retentive coolness of the orange groves.
Certainly, lord, I came to use my tongue,
and what I have to tell you is:
through it speaks the errant wood,
nuptial armature of your enemy.
Since the beginning we were destined.
The moisture of life yearns for a language
that industrious time has built
with the very substance of the silent.
The silent roars, whistles, explodes in the thicket
with the general thunder of warbling.
The silent articulating its impossible
dialogue with the blank pages . . .
In a corner
of the Pitti Palace gardens
you can see all sorts of snacks,
and were other examples of sweetness needed,
without resorting to Giorgione’s thinking peach,
you could wake up again in New Orleans,
the sycamores dripping on a lucid porch
rented out indiscriminately to the voracious.
It’s not a matter of analogies or resonances,
there the misery starts where the musician finishes
who stretched his violin to the syllable of fire.
This is what it’s about, the fire wants to speak
even using a dull pencil and a sheet of paper
that vaguely pretends to be transparent:
not because of being fire, since the trogon likewise
flutters through the leaves with veiled fame, never likewise,
eye, blood, stone, son, want to
cross the limit of their installations
that are smoking ruins leveled by the infantry.
Nature says: to see me, go through me, oh, to be seen,
would only be worth the trouble in the act of giving birth to myself
projected in a moving body that carries me to the other place.
The plunge lasts for worlds and you are at your post
in Fort Belvedere or on the moon in the water of the San Juan.
Choose whether to remain on that unspeaking shore
or to chastely fecundate the only wife.
Then the snack and its words are a face,
the journeys are one journey, the fire gives light to a man, let us begin.
The silent bursts into speech, using language
that rose from the mist on the water,
like a sun splitting into a rainbow.
Out of charity and need the tongue
says it all helped by the hand,
fiercely supported by the eye
where the concave adjusts to the convex.
All that’s said acquires another substance.
The wood has started walking toward the castle
of diabolical silence and cursed blood.
Life is not the tale told by an idiot
but the march of the wood and the wheeling of the stars
in the voice of the messenger who isn’t done.
That is my story, the story of my tongue.
Life is that, the tongue of the story.
Succumb, infernal power, usurping and silent,
drowned by the wood. I will keep proclaiming.
What begins had already begun,
the heron insinuates itself like a flower of justice.
History is the miracle of nature
when Birnam Wood begins to walk
in the siege of the castle the devil rented .
But the wood had always been advancing toward the castle.
A tiny destination, corrupted
by the enjoyment of secret venetian blinds,
suddenly equals the Battle of San Romano
painted by Uccello as if he were returning
infernal history to the earth’s equations.
The mathematical earth, the flute-playing earth.
“Water, ammonia, carbonic acid, float now,
bathed in solar rays: to scorn that mist
would be to deprive the young star of its most essential ornament,”
says Teilhard smitten.
From that nostalgic mist emerges Attila galloping toward the blue
of little Thérèse of Lisieux. In that mist
the old musicians and I, a child, are playing
the Stabat Mater of Rossini, while the boat
with my brother advances toward the outlet
covered by the blond haze of dawn.
There was no Turner nor Ruskin for the San Juan,
but there was also no Milanés for the Thames. The complementary
nonexistences nail daybreak with a golden nail.
All that’s needed is a push for the boat.
We advance in the mist that floats over everything,
mother of the petiole’s heart and the tiger’s eye,
disguised with the branches of the immemorial wood that advances
in the siege of the castle, and we don’t know
if now we’re troops armed to the teeth
or the country bride on the morning of her wedding.
January 1971
* * *
Fayad Jamís (1930–1988)
The Wedding in the Anthill
Fiesta of the pine tree, the baker and the newborn cicada! It’s the worms who prepare the barrels of moonshine. My bride sings and dances wrapped in red firelight. Let’s celebrate the great wedding in the anthill by my hearth. Fiesta in the endless night, over the burning pasture of the world. Courage to the lamb that takes fright before the fierce wall of flames licking the sky ever higher as frogs and bootblacks throw onto the coals the well-washed bodies of the banker, the soldier and the doctor! To your health, oh lucky, red, pure, joyous anthill by my hearth!
Wanderer of the Dawn
The pale Paris morning grows over my shoulders
after the long night my love this breeze
Leaves the color of autumn honey gliding through the streets
on the sidewalks the autumn leaves over the beggars’ heads
Still they sleep a woman has risen picked up a beret
by a sleeper’s feet and covered his face
The tenderness of that woman under her black rags
like the pale flower of the day like the dove
fluttering over the Seine of smoke of glass of silver
That’s how daybreak is here I tell you now that it’s autumn
that’s how the dawn is the city is dead its bones can be touched
and no one will say anything the police sleep their ears of cork
the laws sleep misery dozes I walk I walk
first man in this new day as if the city were my wife
and I watched her sleeping naked the sky rising from her back
That’s how Paris is I tell you sometimes I dream that I’m going through a dead world
after the last bomb even hope dead
I don’t understand much but I feel a bit like Robinson Crusoe
the Robinson of this beautiful terrible great city called Paris
Cats emerge from everywhere good morning the garbage bins are full
broken toys rotten fruit suits papers torn apart
papers where oblivion has left its dark scar
The world civilization all that has died the cats and I survive
Facing one of these bridges I shall choose my home
maybe that one with the red curtain in the window
or the other that comes forward as though it wished to greet me good morning
But no it’s not true behind all those gray walls are men
who breathe snore and dream
men who maybe recall a cry lost in the turquoise valley of the centuries
men who are thinking perhaps about the new models of automobiles
about their work about love maybe about death
That black spot swept along by the current is a cardboard box
I thought it was a tortoise I thought it was a lawyer
and it’s nothing more than a cardboard box three leaves floating around it
like three hearts of honey three figures of autumn
The trees emerge from the river like smoke from cigars
Another dove flutters about its white shadow over the gray water
The urinals have the cunning beauty of certain churches in Castile
I enter them to do something while I think
while I walk my love which is to say no one the world those leaves
The traffic signals give the go-ahead to the cats to the breeze
these amber lights on the brow of the pale day
Last night they were talking about the war always the war
corpses foam of eternity corpses
but not everyone know how sweet is freedom for example at these hours
when the milkman’s white wagon follows his white beasts
A girl from Israel was talking to me about her country’s youth
she has no religion she loves Paris she loves the world
tomorrow we’ll all have the same bronze face and speak the same language
tomorrow although you may not want it mister general mister businessman mister glasses of wire and ash
soon the new life the new man will build their cities
on top of your bones and mine on top of the dust of Notre-Dame
In the first bakery to open I will buy a large loaf
like I used to do in my country except that now my friends are not with me
and I’m no longer twenty
Then I would have seen all those shadows in another color
I would have whistled I would have dragged with me the memory of a flaxen-haired girl
In the end all those things are left behind
now it’s more important to work in order to live
Some birds begin to sing the dead leaves fall
I’m going away from the river the boats the white bridges
these buildings look like they might fall on my head
they’re becoming hunchbacked with the passing of the centuries
the Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche inspires terrible stories
But it’s better to carry on it’s dawn it’s dawn
hands in pockets keep going keep going
Two butchers hack with an axe at a side of beef
it’s not fun but I like to watch
my soul is still a bit of a butcher it’s 1956
Tomorrow maybe it won’t be like this maybe there won’t be butchers or executioners
my heart part executioner and part hanged man
your heart your heart will be dust water wind
for the new sunflowers
each seed like a sleeping bee
The pale day was white now it’s turning yellow
some chimneys seem about to catch fire
A soldier passes with an enormous suitcase
on his way to the Gare de Lyon on his way to Egypt death
A woman passes on a bicycle she is going to work
when the sun is knee-high to her like wheat
every day all her life she goes to work
A truck passes loaded with wine with a clatter with dawn
I’m already on the Boulevard Saint-Germain I’m looking in the bookstore windows
Some day I’ll buy a good dictionary the complete works of Rimbaud
lots of books best not to speak of that
Beggars are sleeping everywhere that one looks like a child
between his head and the cement sidewalk there is nothing but a frozen sheet of metal
I feel like drinking my breakfast coffee I’m hungry and thirsty
the yellow dawn tastes bad in my mouth
Paris is beginning to awaken I’m not Robinson anymore
just a foreigner a ghost
a man who has not slept
a wanderer in the city the autumn the dawn
while my love must be gazing at the summits of Peru
or the enameled sky of China
I don’t know my feet are tired that’s all there is
After having loved to live the new day
is beautiful
The same flame burns in the city and the heart.
Charlie and the Moon
In memory of Escardó
In the slums of South London or Bayamo
the cats and the moon play on the rooftops
There’s always someone to throw a stone at them always
someone who wants to take four shots at the moon but also
there are men who noticing it above the garbage bin
run down the stairs to the corner bar
to put a record on the victrola a slightly misty number
that could be the sweetness of spring or the tenderness of eyes forever lost
Sometimes a beggar staggers along with a piece of the moon
on his head surrounded by flies
The local kids shout at him:
“Hey, king, nice silver crown you’re wearing!
We’re going to buy you another bottle!”
And the beggar
after dancing a slow waltz
falls at last onto the dirty mirror of the sidewalk
At his side the moon shivers like a chilly cat.
In the slums of the North on the beaches of Cuba
or in a ramshackle doorway in the Vallecas district in Madrid
when someone takes his little dog to pee or when someone hangs out
his only shirt in the night wind
the moon appears over an electrical pole
and then someone begins to sing
“I’m no longer so alone
in this world . . . ”
In a kitchen two slices of fish are frying
The smell of onions makes the police turn round coming and going
through the street while they wait for the first
melancholy-eyed thief to emerge
from a dark window with his enormous sack
Charlie’s whiskers twitch like two furious mosquitoes
but the owner of the fish won’t let him pass
All those walls all those corridors
stairways rising toward the dust and the night
are full of human beings who want to eat and live
in spite of the spiderwebs or the knife in the back
they want to live
Even the twisted bones of the old folks
they want to live
orange flames over the grass yellow rivers of autumn
Right now the moon slips down over the heads of the wretched
and a plane zooms past toward other continents or toward the beaches of emptiness
The children are jumping on an empty bottle
on a rag doll on the bright red
face of all the tyrants in the world the children are jumping
little birds of the drizzle birds of the sun
They who could go as far as Saturn
on the neck of a giraffe
They who know how to build a city
from pieces of glass and clay
The captains of empty lots the conquerors
of great prehistoric beasts
Those who sometimes keep in their coffers
all that is needed to buy an ice cream
Charlie is there dreaming among the children
His shoes stumble in every direction
Charlie is there the crickets have stopped their screeching
Twelve doves fly out of the moon
and flutter above the chorus of playing children
until one settles on Charlie’s left foot
“Hurray for nights in the backyard hurray for the crystal doves!
Hurray for the smell of the trees hurray for strawberry ice cream!”
They’re going to bury him in a pasture
that other fellow they’re going to crown
him over there with eyes like grains of corn
they’re going to sit in an electric chair
It’s already divvied up
and the man who only feeds on shadow is not the man who has ten factories
working for his joy
and the man who was born with an enormous nose
is not the man who hides behind the white flame of a woman
Up there cats sniff
the garbage bins
The chimneys send out no smoke
the record player on the corner is going to burst
like a giant toad
while an old wooden throat
says that everything everything’s going to start over
And the madman in the house across the street?
and the girls with necks like the milky way?
and my cigar that won’t stop burning?
Charlie shows up down there again
and begins to dance to the sound of a mambo
while the moon sweet lamp of the slums emerges from his hat
* * *
Heberto Padilla (1932–2000)
Discourse on Method
If after the bombing is over,
walking on the grass that can grow just as well
among the ruins
as in the hat on your bishop’s head,
you can imagine that you’re not seeing
what’s going to be right before your eyes,
or that you’re not hearing
what you’ll have to hear for a long time yet:
or (still worse)
you think that cleverness or good judgment will be enough
to keep you from finding
only a demolished armchair and a heap of broken books,
when you come home one day
I advise you to run at once,
to look for a passport,
some countersign,
a sickly child, anything
that could give you an alibi for a sluggish police force
(because it’s all
peasants and farmhands now)
and to get away once and for all.
Escape by the back stairs
(so that no one will see you).
Don’t take anything.
It’ll be of no use--
not an overcoat, or a glove, or a family name,
not a gold bar, or a vague title.
Don’t waste time
hiding jewelry in the walls
(they’ll find it anyway).
Don’t start keeping manuscripts in the cellar
(the military will find them later).
Be wary of the most loyal maid.
Don’t hand the keys to the chauffeur, don’t entrust
the gardener with the dog.
Don’t fool yourself with news from the shortwave radio.
Stop before the tallest mirror in the living room, calmly,
and contemplate your life,
look at yourself as you are now
because this will be the last time.
Now they’re taking the barricades from the parks.
Now the assailants of power are mounting the podium.
Now the dog, the gardener, the chauffeur, the maid
are in the crowd applauding.
Prayer for the Turn of the Century
We who have always glanced with irony and indulgence
at the motley collection of things from the turn of the century: the buildings,
and the children
fettered in dark suits.
We for whom the turn of the century was at most
an engraving and a French prayer.
We who believed that after a hundred years what was left was
a black bird holding a grandmother’s hairnet.
We who have seen the collapse of parliaments
and the patchy ass of liberalism.
We who learned to distrust famous myths
and to whom the idea of a parlor with candelabras
a curtain
and a Louis XV chair
seems absolutely impossible
(uninhabitable).
We, children and grandchildren now of melancholy terrorists
and superstitious scientists,
we who know that today we commit the error
that someone else will condemn tomorrow.
We, living the final years
of this century,
stroll about, incapable of improvising an unplanned
movement;
gesticulate in a space more restricted
than in the lines of an engraving;
put on dark suits
as if we were going to attend a parliament,
while the candelabras flare in the cornice
and the black birds
break the hairnet of this girl with the hoarse voice.
Cuban Poets Don’t Dream Anymore
Cuban poets don’t dream anymore
(not even at night).
They get up to close the door so they can write alone
when suddenly the wood creaks;
the wind pushes them adrift;
some hands catch them by the shoulders,
turn them around,
set them face to face with other faces
(sunk in swamps burning with napalm)
and the world flows above their mouths
and the eye is obliged to see, to see, to see.
Poetics
Tell the truth.
At least tell your truth.
And after
let anything happen:
let them tear up your beloved page,
let them knock down your door,
let people
crowd around your body
as if you were
a miracle or a corpse.
The Place of Love
Always, past your shoulders I see the world.
It sparkles beneath the storm clouds.
It’s a piece of rotted wood, an old lantern
swaying as if against the current.
The world that our bodies
(our solitude) cannot abolish,
a century of sappers and frogmen
under your pillow,
in the place where your shoulders
become softer, more fragile.
Always, past your shoulders
(we can never avoid it now)
there is a list of the missing,
a village destroyed,
a child trembling.
* * *
Belkis Cuza Malé (1942– )
The Cinderellas
We are the cinderellas.
Mister Botticelli painted the three
fairy godmothers for us.
We are not innocent.
The Prince has never kissed us.
We have not set foot in his chamber,
nor licked his belly.
We live in the kitchen,
our moon is the fire.
Our feet are enormous;
a long bath would suit us nicely.
We go around in ragged skirts,
our hair disheveled
and we eat stale bread.
We are not innocent.
Because we were black, ugly and whores
they booed us at the Miss Universe pageant.
But we (the foulmouthed) cry out
merde! to the king’s ass
and merde! to his ministers,
though they rage at our stench.
Pandora’s Box
The street is the danger, but you wander forth
and surprise yourself beside the bronze knocker
of the tall doors. And when you’re about to be heard
committing a gaffe,
a gust of air stops you for an instant,
makes you turn your face and you discover the old woman
standing beside you
with her heavy wicker basket, where her hidden
Pandora’s box sparkles.
You distrust your imagination, you don’t give in
you make way for
time’s arguments
and the mere idea of love.
She continues on her way.
It was only the temptation to offer you everything.
Why were you not tempted by the miracle of curiosity?
Critique of Impure Reason
She opens the door to her house and enters
like a stranger,
as if she were entering the world
by the back door.
On the walls the ship
drawn by her daughter sails,
the laundry bill
hangs from the mainmast.
Her neighbors have decided to get married today
and to borrow her furniture for a while.
She enters her house and starts to write,
she needs to arrange the world somehow,
to create a man for herself,
a nanny for her daughter
and a bit of life for the cats she doesn’t have.
She begins to write,
as if she were before a jury,
she takes out her paper heroines,
because she is a girl who lives alone,
who sleeps alone,
who dances alone.
She is the girl
you need to destroy
in order to feel stronger.
The Navel of the World
In a girl’s belly
there are bites and big scars,
sheep that time has almost erased.
There are bones and posters and strands of men’s hair
and traffic signs;
there are sterilizing pills
and time bombs, pistols, baby teeth,
napalm fire,
leaves and butterflies,
pots of flowers and engagement rings.
The great crimes,
the divorces,
the evictions,
ripen in a girl’s belly.
The navel of the world
is a girl’s belly.
Prospectors,
kings for hire,
chocolate soldiers,
liars,
rapists,
professors of aesthetics,
United States presidents,
violinists,
horse thieves,
married men,
village priests,
swindlers,
provocateurs,
scientists,
doctors,
globetrotters,
judges,
proletarians,
cannibals,
chatterboxes,
drunks,
voyeurs,
stop poking around in girls’ bellies.