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by Dinapiera Di Donato


  hipnotizados nuestros huesos buenos

  te siguen

  repaso con el delineador tus ojos faraones

  cierro el sarcófago muy suavemente

  cuido tu sueño

  ENTREVISTA DE LA MADONNA HODIGITRIA, LA DE LA FLECHA

  en la vida antigua, llamados melancólicos, se han ido detrás de las antorchas

  hablemos del camino

  en un hueco de la tierra, contábamos historias

  antes

  cuando los suelos salinizados se parten y no hay raíces para la cena

  o es la hora de volar por los aires, sólo pienso en contar historias

  supongamos que tú y yo

  recolectores de las tumoraciones de los árboles

  para costosas tinturas venenosas

  tú ocupado en los rosedales

  que aún hay bibliotecas y burdeles para las insomnes que suenan

  sus grillos caseros

  que

  las maderas y la piedra y el cadáver del bosque te encierran allí

  lograda muerta

  la eterna joven

  que

  un día estarás quieta sin drama

  entre raspaduras de letras y cabellos vegetales egipcios

  que resucitas los ojos la cadera el día

  que te llamas la Virgen que hila las gotas la muchacha aquella

  la garganta la boca la lengua

  que lames también de la mano del aire

  y dejas el refugio guiada por atentas ánimas

  que liman

  amorosamente

  tus colmillos

  de hija de Cioran el humorista y de Simone Buoé la que reía con Cioran

  que tenía sin embargo piedad

  de un poeta vampiro y su luz muerta

  de ascetas encerrados en panteones heroicos como piedras caídas

  de la luna

  y subes

  al mundo

  Supongamos

  que has dejado los vocablos del odio-amor

  y pones

  a la santa en su lugar

  y sales

  sin ser notada

  del falso sosiego

  EL TESTAMENTO DE NUESTRA SEÑORA

  Tras la última pena de civiles

  llegan los días de limpiar el aire

  me ocupo de las restauraciones del huerto

  elimino el barniz oxidado de las tablas de pino

  alguna noche recuerdo a mi madre

  detrás del verdaccio de las carnaciones desaparecidas

  cuando trae sus dorados al agua sobre fondo rojo

  y las láminas buriladas vuelven a la industria automotriz

  el gesto de pergaminera de mi madre con su cuchillo

  cuando elimina restos de carne y pelos de estas pieles

  reescritas una y otra vez

  el gesto de ikebana

  doblegar el invierno en

  ramas de forsitias

  y limpio sus dedos lacerados con las listas de las Ostracas

  punzadas las actas sobre moluscos

  donde se inscriben los indeseables

  los palimpsestos de las leyes borradas para los reescritos

  fundacionales

  delirios a la carta nuevas videncias variaciones

  de dueños del mundo

  mi madre señaladora de caminos me expulsa

  a la vida eterna

  Y repito el desgaste de las manos

  en el trabajo de vivir

  sus líneas secas

  una monja momificada

  para la consagración de turno

  comiendo lo mejor del pescado

  sus ojos

  Los reyes de las cocinas salvan

  el gusto de la especie

  Santa Lucía o Teresa

  detrás de máscaras plateadas

  en un catafalco

  ya han repartido sus pupilas en bandeja

  La ciega del sarcófago de cristal veneciano

  con el guía Orfeo

  llega en medio de turistas de veinte años con sus botas de hule desafiando el

  agua alta y susurra en mis oídos que está solo

  que las fieras

  cada vez más cerca

  conozco su viejo cuento

  hundo mi mano para traerte a la luz de la casa

  me arrodillo entre tus piernas

  Sólo el ojo del móvil vibrando

  NO HABLO DE UNA VIDA JAPONESA, TE ESTOY HABLANDO DE MI MADRE

  Mastico a mi madre

  como un pájaro azul de las diez entrevisto en el follaje

  de Inwood con Alina

  picoteo sus ojos de horcada

  no soy el cuervo de mi madre

  mi mirada es oscura de bella terminación

  y ya no soy el olor del buitre del zamuro del ruego de mi madre

  Alina me lleva por el prado de asfódelos

  por donde viene mi madre

  déjala ahí,

  criatura,

  deja a tu madre que vaya a reinar

  y sigue

  sola.

  INTRODUCTION

  The poetry of Venezuelan author Dinapiera Di Donato exhibits a tremendous control of language, an inviting sense of Eros in the sweep of history, presenting a version of love that is lost to the agency of myth until it reaches the body. It sets us in the past, but wait, we are here in our bed, which is always a river; all dreams are perceived with great clarity. Coming across a line like “the weight of the grass fits on the tip of a stone,” I am reminded of Lorca, when he compares a lizard to a “drop of a crocodile,” and that Andalusian verse form still prevalent in Latin America. Her poetry as prayer pleads for the full disclosure of a mystery, and her minimalist work breathes life into the obvious and the occult. We are fascinated when we encounter Arabic in her verse and when she references the seminal work of Ibn Al Àrabi, the most significant Moorish Sufi poet of Medieval Spain; her reading of Oriental forms as background for Latino culture is incisive, especially in content and with her magisterial control of language. At times, her poems oscillate between history and geography: “you are dark you are a heaven for kings/queen of Baghdad my lover from the Bronx.” Her work takes us to the linguistic/anthropological/cultural lookout that is the Spanish language. We become aware of its shifts, but we enjoy them, in the same way that we enjoy how her verse allows us to become aware of the roots of Spanish grammar in the Arabic and Hebrew forms known as kharja. We are intimate, and part of a whole; we are removed, but that distance also brings us to the immediate. Her poetry is a tapestry of cultures, eras, sexuality, and desire. Her spirit is at once ancient and modern.

  Intelligent and exacting, Dinapiera Di Donato is a vital poet for our times, and worthy of the memory of Octavio Paz.

  Victor Hernández Cruz

  Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico

  May 2013

  ONE

  INSIDE THE CAVERN

  The days are not long, night will fall soon,

  writing in shadows is an arduous task.

  —Gonzalo de Berceo,

  from the Prologue to “Poem of Saint Aurea Virgin” (thirteenth century)

  DAY

  During the day we would meet as demonstrators, at night we would be cast

  as extras in the Meatpacking

  coupling inside freezers

  with any girl

  because we would plot our ambush.

  I won’t complain about my displacement

  in the days of our country

  what else would we bring to our mouths if not these women, transient soldiers

  queen ants in the bitter juice of Catara?

  among the streets cities beds

  quickly abandoned

  what else would we leave behind?

  artists load our fragile bundles

  we all play the skin flute

  our throats love once again

  geometry

  forever

  the golden form that once could have been a tale of a Virgin

  song and melody
by Berceo calming the troops

  Oria or Aurea from Rioja, who would rather be blind than see herself wed

  set out, a pilgrim, neurotic or young, to the Benedictine monastery

  from the top of the minaret

  naming Winehouse her holy redhead for the eternal thirst

  Valerie oh Valerie

  when you cross the waters on your own

  displaced, willing crusader

  join the demonstration, come down from your cross

  help me with my body

  to address her wishes, the bricklayers carve a hole into the temple walls

  in San Millán of Suso, the one on higher ground

  —where they also buried Lara’s seven infantes—

  in front of the high altar and the choir where monks would chant,

  that’s where they bury her behind walls

  she began to have visions

  —not always steered by holy guides—

  and dies, ill and aged, at 27, in the 11th century

  my days in transit, my return

  to nowhere

  my nights at the shelter

  all of us imagining the fragrance we lack

  the shores you keep to yourself

  NIGHT

  SCRIPT WRITTEN ON OUR SKIN

  There is snow covering the valleys of the Cárdenas River

  I got a table

  I got it

  simple notes from hunters

  now they got them

  I read in the mirror’s neck of a woman reclining on David’s scroll

  the frozen beaks of a slow bird

  there was no snow for some time there was no table

  but always bonfires

  more messages come in

  the museum guards become helpless at this hour

  contorted between the frame and the screen of the iridescent vibrator

  in her cell phone

  the copyist’s Hebrew broken by bedroom Spanish

  semen on the white hyenas embroidered on your panties

  I read over her shoulder

  the words losing consonants this time

  no one guessed she would manage

  to drain her glands

  over Marina Abramović

  the guards stirring our shame

  one after the other and another

  at the bottom of our bags

  a devout procession urges me forward, toward the psalm and

  on the illuminated D of Fra Angelico, she begins to sing each note

  her companions admire her Jewish erudition and doubt

  the validity of a mystic novices’ workshop

  and guard her

  with Fate’s scissors

  whoever dares indulge an ounce of intimacy

  The crowd and I behind it

  caught in an area without reception

  where cell phones go silent just before

  the triptych of the Nativity

  she stumbles steps back trips over me

  flashing cell phones curse at me

  and I, who bring with me from the previous canvas, the violent light

  Saint Jerome tested with friendly fire

  the figure who always flees from patristic tales

  as if a diamond stripped of rotten shell

  could show life

  and now they got them

  they got them

  as though there could be saints

  without the blessed Vulgate and the heavy drug

  of Christ’s love when Our Lady Inanna tames

  and women poets graze on the greenest branches

  move over a little let me pass

  turn yourself into

  a score by Von Bingen with the voice of Uxia

  at the bottom of your glass

  see the falling flakes

  in the landscape I made for you simply because you pretend

  to be alive, just for me, near a park

  indignant

  restive

  and not at your morning appointment

  which flew in the air

  UNLAWFUL MOMENT

  when everything that pursued me was petrified light

  thus robed I step in with my darkness

  into canvases

  a pentimento spilling over the nape of the woman in the next painting

  while she studies the lingering angels

  Madonnas like illuminated vulvas

  tongues pressed on Saint Lucia’s altarpiece

  a dark woman who reclines with her age-old blindness and a fair one who is

  blinded by sight

  watching desires fitted with wings

  to the teeth

  with deft fingers you press on with a lens and alter the terms of the Fates

  smoked palate

  there lying beside me

  gold and nauseated with honey and drink

  retched and loved in my mouth

  you are no longer your own experiment

  testing yourself

  on foreign missions

  you return the diamond to the ears of Africa and water flows back

  and recedes in time

  bright branches that mark the Virgin’s return

  from distant shores

  a choir of Ani de Franco and Kerrianne Cox, of Cesarea and Joplin awakens you

  a visitor and her angel have been served at my table

  the computer set aside

  her bones and the shadow of her bones in a workshop study

  skins read by a beautiful Jewish woman last night in Manhattan

  while on another shore

  her lover’s hands caressed the snow in daylight foam

  with the same oversight

  she figured you’d show, emerging from hangover

  with tribal dreams of hyenas standing straight

  with the posture of a sober woman

  a girl immured in Silense Cavern

  white butterflies in a field

  like snow dusting the monastery of San Millán

  CLAVICLE

  Fra Angelico draws his comic strips with gold

  Even the Trust had yet to secure rights to the visions

  before Catherine of Siena states her terms

  to be cast as the invisible woman

  A single wheel will appear and unsettle the composition

  soon after the brethren confer to discuss if stigmata would heal if Our Lord

  Jesus Christ

  would give up his airs of a red dove from outer space

  And also demons like Chinese horoscopes

  we tremble

  Catherine is a loving emptiness

  one could see it

  because her wheel, hovering like a spacecraft, takes flight

  it’s Plato’s androgyne in its monstrous turning

  a cheap drug out of a porn film

  How much more to parse in Fra Angelico’s script

  in the history of the gaze

  the missing segment

  DESICCATED WOUND

  She said she walked among vampires in the left of the frame

  at the spot I couldn’t dare look at you oh black girl

  hidden in the thick light of the purple eyelet

  dissolved in the black blood of a tumorous discharge

  in this sacred story

  One leftover bone scraped clean for the broth of the world

  Blessed Angelico in his radiologist’s cloak

  hands you his scalpel

  OCCUPIED TERRITORY

  In Saint Jerome’s recurring dream

  —as transcribed by the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus

  and Mary, SCTJM—

  a girl dressed in thorns sets out

  from Sabana de Maturin

  using her lips to whistle

  a tune in harmony with the inverted sky

  a sky saturated with glass for sleeping

  in tune with her heavy rusted lips

  the girl flowered over her cactus
r />   beauties also age in greenery

  burying scars in patios

  for the greenery’s sake

  like a loving serpent wrapped at the murderous foot of her Virgin

  praying, her eye always open

  as the sea

  And she dreamed of the Renaissance painting

  Christ’s face with his skin of a glorious lion

  dark circles that persist under the eye

  circles tinted then softened

  the bluish hue of angel excrement

  sassi, my lamb, the saint whispers, sassi

  for the precise carving of the face, we’ll make use of the best skinner

  I knead a drying whiteness and the saint spits out the Illyrian words

  of his mother tongue

  a whistling you heed as with a game of scorpions

  The girl hides by the ribs

  setting fire to the herd

  IN A FIELD OF SAFFRON LOVING THEIR ROOTS WITH A LILAC COLOR BRIMMING IN THE BASKET

  She was neither for hire

  Nor of the ranks of the mystical doors

  Nor was she custodion, or versed in other dimensions, nor was she a Marian

  fundamentalist

  Nor an assasin

  She avoids Innana, or the novice Sarasa, hides from the camera in processions

  like a village’s Oriundina who opens the alcove doors

  She burned from within, aimless

  to bring comfort to the conflicts of the fatally dispossessed

  THE LUNGS OF THE DISPOSESSED EXPAND IN HER WILD GARDEN

  And the Vulgate misleads with regard to the long stalks of the saffron’s lilac

  that you hear the crushing of her ribs and the forest is rid of your meat

  and arrays your neck with rings of low-grade tripes

  Don’t you spit out

  Hang up your skin

  Each night glowing on her own

  no longer active on her blog

  without henna on her summer profile

  withholding her sutra, her esteem, not knowing the cult

  of personality

  She is a girl with her thorns riding the train

  grass spreading with each step, making room for a desert

 

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