Poetry
Hay Beach Poems: Two Excerpts
Appearing out of something else, Ashberry bursts
into endless discourse, as if the instant were a
succession of words, waves of existence in a
dense and senseless ocean, an aroma that is to be
distilled. Reason, rabies, suture, a dog that
appears in the distance with sands and hidden
drops; the dog licks excitedly his wounds, from
his mouth falls the drool which will heal him;
the grey-haired man suggests a persistence in the
ear, he looks, trains, entertains himself, the
girl’s kite splashes its beauty; the mother
thoroughly approves the development of her
daughter’s style. Memory hides there in order to
whack your desire. Even when innocence prospers,
sound’s efficacy is unstable, still the impulse
towards language is like something that forms
over time in the shell of a heart beating and
beating ceaselessly.
Already the sun aligns the blue uncertainty of
what will be inscribed in the spheres, in the
incessant replication of waves. In this way,
opening the eyes to the incredible immateriality
of the horizon, no fault can alter its illusion.
The currents speak with unbelievable voices, a
vocabulary of slips and silences, of radiances
and shadows in the darkness of that water which
becomes agitated with the impact of air and
breeze, of the sketch of algae at the edge. The
already repeated language of shadows does not
raise itself in the insistent ancestral air. It
is not race that encourages, but the voice of the
foreigner travelling the earth to remember, more
intense the appreciation for what is seen:
insult, perspective, mystery, and selection. She
doesn’t know why the winds brought her to a
horizon of sails, to the urge for silencing the
incessant, or obstructing the current with astral
noise. She submits with sharp legs to the
confusion that will not agree to certainties.
There are no longer shadows only in literature
and in voice and they are voices and they are
voices that do not distort their lies. What
gives life is in a sense simplified, it does not
result in a fuss but in a useless desire for the
dark, instead of nodding one’s head at the
inexorable lucidity of the constancies. She does
not dare to penetrate the divine, as if the
rhetoric of the dream were not a unanimous
reading of the sky. Scratch the surfaces,
believe in the substances, slide along the
current, see in the singularity of the journey
just one sky without frontiers, only one blue
without horizon, an abstract scenery without
contours, without accessible distances, without
retinas demanding the certainty of borders, to be
right now a trail sliding through the fault
current of forms, one more color in the general
structure of the universe, flattened by celestial
vertigo, by the relentless variety of action,
put to the rhythm of broad daylight.
Contributor
Lila ZemborainZemborain is an Argentine poet and critic who has lived in New York City since 1985.
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