I.
The Sponge in my brain
The neurosurgeon finds a sponge
growing in my brain.
Does it hurt? he asks.
No, I tell him, it only causes disquiet.
It longs for the sea, for water
and it’s afflicted with a voracious appetite for words.
It devours them whole, I tell him.
I’ve been reduced to a solitary animal
Whose sole purpose is to feed it.
Only sleep quiets it.
It dreams Aquamarine dreams of floating medusas,
of pages sinking into the abyss.
Imagine. How many books must have perished in the tides?
How much paper is submerged among the dunes?
Who’s recorded the libraries that went down with their ships?
Books lost forever?
Logs of inebriated captains?
People lament libraries consumed by fire,
But my sponge imagines drowned manuscripts
And my dreams are adrift with bottles
Carrying love letters
That hover in a limbo of vanished stories.
The doctor eyes me with compassion.
He prescribes soda water
Ocean baths
Meditation.
At the door, I bid him farewell,
Taking note of how much time has passed.
I go back to my sofa
With my books
Wine,
Solitude,
The porous creature
Thirsting
In my brain.
(Translated from the Spanish by Charles Castaldi)
II.
RIVERS OF LIFE
I inhabit a long and narrow space
A canyon dug by ancient waters
Hemmed in by walls
Whose surfaces mark geologic time.
There’s a sky above
Very distant
A blue strip that fills with stars at night
I have seen meteors
With incandescent trails rush by
And I have wished to follow them.
How did I end up down here
In a place where water
Deep and quiet
Flows obediently to the ocean?
There are days
When currents of desolation
Wash over me
And no school of shimmering fish
No wild flowers blooming along the banks
No polished stones
Can rescue me from the void.
Love is a reflected echo
A handsome young man appears in my mirror
And smiles before embarking on countless expeditions.
I float on my back, hair extended,
Watching the flock of migrant birds
Diving in to build their nests.
Their songs bring me an ephemeral happiness
I am a woman who interrogates her body
The rare stillness of her consciousness
As a wind swept water lily
might ponder the meaning of its beauty
Perhaps the rapids ahead will tear at my flesh
Floating branches will entangle my arms
A solitary fisherman
Will find pieces of my silky garments
Hooked on his lure
And wonder what lovers were swallowed
By the mysterious forest darkness
That stretches to the ridges in the distance
Floating on my back I see
The canyon’s walls,
Clouds over a swath of blue
Nature which gyrates around my axis
Unfurled on the sails of time
Going like me towards the sea
Towards the final unknown
The deep
Where consonants verbs vowels
Will dissolve
Into nothingness
(Translated from the Spanish by Charles Castaldi)
III.
Written in what?
I hear the sound of the coming storm
And wish that my name
Like yours
Mr. Keats
Would be writ in water
Hidden in a cemetery in Rome.
I have often imagined my tombstone
Covered in weeds,
An irreverent epitaph
“I didn’t want to be here”.
And I won’t be there.
I will remain in a space inhabited by ones and zeros
My name writ in bytes
Webs, tendrils, filaments, radio- waves dispersing my sentences niceties “tip-thumbed” on the keyboard, at night,
When I move silently, like a burglar
Things said for a mute, passive accomplice
But suddenly found, discovered by unknown trespassers
Of my restless imaginings
Look at what this woman wrote, they might say,
Perhaps taking me to be the brunette
The browser has chosen to label with my name
-A vague resemblance of myself-
Or they won’t say a thing. They will just read my words and marvel at a time when women had to say: Here I am. Take note.
No names written in water in the 21st Century
Just shipwrecks or magnificent armadas
Lost or parading on liquid plasma
An electronic storm
And a million teacups
Trying to make sense of so many words
Dispersed like raindrops
In a monsoon
Splashing
And bouncing
Endlessly
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