Four Poems

River
 
The river of my childhood drags along stones and refrigerators, broken tables, useless umbrellas, and anonymous corpses. In this river there are tears and blood, unfulfilled promises, muck and excrement, long-standing curses among the ruins of a house, and a doll’s tiny hand.

The river of my childhood is a useless rage that pierces the city, its fear lining the street corners, lining their danger. Few flowers know the river’s shores: the whitest lilies, small and venomous thorns.

The Guaire River has seen too much. The city is naked. It runs and it dances and it gets drunk. It celebrates diamond anniversaries or becomes lost in its spite between markets and telephones.

The city either fasts or fattens, it creates disguises, it roars and curses and it resigns itself. Naked, it embarks on a killing spree or kills itself. It’s a traitor, a backstabber.

On its shores, the battered show their wounds.
The river of my childhood is atrocious silence, tightly-woven resentment.

 

City
 
Unloved city
Ravaged plaza
City forsaken

From revolt and plunder
From a plague of insects
From a fierce and ruthless rain
From unworthy residents
You rise up

City of exiles
City of penitents

Unloved city
City set alight
Never annihilated

Impenitent city
You carry on

 

Chronicles
 
I

Grieving is easy. All it takes is a gust of humid air, an echo of rain or cold, the half-light. All it takes is a distant bell tolling its afternoon hours, or a blue dress, or a paragraph. Like death, sadness is commonplace, routine. What does it matter.

II

Within my body, a poisonous branch grows. A thorny, sharp, and lacerating branch that slowly fills my veins, my heart, my bones.

My blood is a thick venom, a bitter and fragrant sap, a flow of slow, silent poison.

My heart cracks, writhes, splits open.

Beneath my eyelids, a death fills the view like a gnarled landscape.
 
III

Furtive figures that pass like a black river.

Umbrellas that open indoors in the middle of the night, shadows.

Shadows that drift through the walls and turn all they touch to shadow. Shadows that roam without haste or angst, touching the children’s fear, echoes.

Echoes that never become words, empty skins.

Nightmares.

IV

Something wants to rip this afternoon from the world, to rip us out. Blades, razors, and long needles of ice fall, long red claws searching for people’s eyes. It rains a wild, hungry water. The umbrellas flap their wings like bats exposed to the light. The everlasting and omniscient rain, crushing, blots out any sign, revokes it all.  



No Street Will Survive You
 
Not one street will survive. I leave you, city, neglectful host, mean-spirited and alone. Not a sunset, not a shadow, not a sky, not even a flower.

Not one street will survive. I leave you, eyeless city, though you are not blind. You might shamefully hide amputations and kyphosis, ulcers and plunder. You might not. You don’t exist, you are not.

Not one street will survive. I leave you, giftless city, city with neither a stone, a cloud formation, cool water, a missing cat. 

Not one street will survive. I leave you, black-and-white city. I flee from your creatures that listlessly criss-cross your sidewalks, littering and spitting and oozing boredom.  

Not one street will survive. I leave you, impoverished and hopeless city. I leave you without nostalgia, I leave you in obscurity.

Not one street will survive. I leave you, city without stories or dances. From you, not even a name, not even a plaza, not even a morning, not even a cafe, not even fear. City with no moral at the end, not even a postscript, I never lived in you, nobody ever has. 

Not one street will survive. I leave you, city without a heartbeat, barren. I leave you here until the day the ghosts come to collect you, until the winds erase you, until the water washes your houses away. I leave you here with your dirty facades and your thirst. Your death will rattle beneath the dust, songless city, dead word.