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Colaterales/Collateral

Page 6

by Dinapiera Di Donato


  www.ensconet.eu/es/Dormicion.htm, accessed in 2001

  TRYON PARK

  WITH MUNIRA, THE BRILLIANT ONE, ALINA, THE NOBLE ONE, AND ALTAGRACIA, THE DOMINICAN

  Today I came across Mr. El Janabi, who lived a life of grand detourner des mots

  because the words always know the way and enter the Red Sea

  who wouldn’t sit in the forests of Vincennes to speak of Cioran

  the Romanian said to him

  you should go to Paris to learn Romanian

  and if you can, wherever you go

  take care of yourself

  not so much from the maudlin in power

  nor

  from the brotherhood where they are all watching each other

  but

  from the ignorance of the self

  since everything else

  such as taking care of yourself

  you, as a civilian, will end up alone

  whether you believe it or not

  the fabric of your youth will give to an occasional cut or two

  with your mystical recollections each time

  you are able to chew on a sunset

  with its woman’s back to you

  how we tell each other apart at landings

  the righteous and the stray carry the same sign of indiscretion

  and schoolchildren filled with lessons

  from dangerous primers

  learn to read with the large eyes of sacred cattle

  pharaohs in murals of torn scrolls

  in worthy mosaics or in bad ones

  and in copies scattered in Moorish quarters from one end of the desert

  to the other

  which are already fodder

  for film festivals

  DARLING, HE WHO TALKED ABOUT IBN AL-`ARABI WITH RACHID SABBAGHI, WHILE SALVAGING BOOKS LEFT BEHIND DURING AN EXODUS IN ALGECIRAS, DOES NOT REMEMBER YOU

  see how you live

  in the eyes of their children

  those steps into the abyss

  how beasts swim there with holy scriptures and civilian casualties

  as well as the widened eyes of a quick death

  in keys passports foreign currency in send-offs and the usual gift of a car

  at graduation

  brought over to Caracas so they could eat well

  we won’t know if they were happier

  Ever noticed how the road that leads you nowhere makes you feel epic?

  after swallowing corals from the sea and using them around the house

  after the exaltations

  of cashew trees and tales of patriotism are preserved in jars

  classified memories in Picasa

  of life exposed

  in a pamphlet

  after the first lessons of the book Violeta and the soap sent over from La Toja

  to the school-oasis in Almería

  when no justifications were necessary

  for those group portraits

  flanked by the great mummies each decade bears

  you will return to the Andalusian women teachers of Ibn Àrabi

  in Marchena de los Olivares

  in Cordoba

  to

  care for the sweet pepper

  in the tea cups

  neither the epic

  nor hunger

  nor the impassioned life of the elementals

  is as worthy as keeping to the road and leaving nothing of your own

  they read

  and as they read

  they forgot

  MR. EL-YANABI ERASES MUNIRA’S SHADOW IN THE PARK

  in the translations of Iraqi documents

  they tuck in Arevalo’s poems in San Félix

  which echo the sounds of the Al-Fatihah on Šams Um al-Fuqará’s lips

  Nunna Fatima lend me your spit

  because I am an ignorant woman

  I bury myself in Averroes’s books without opening them

  I am no longer an attentive houri

  I am neither gracious nor enraptured

  breath fails me

  and now when I love you I feel around

  to where my prostheses

  have been scattered

  as if I could be a student of Ibn Àrabi traveling

  from palace to dune

  to pay homage at his tomb in Damascus

  as though I could read or chant

  poems read only by

  the sleepless

  the lonely

  sons of beekeepers and soldiers fleeing

  the Holy Father

  Alina, who sees whom we will become

  old women, girls in Inwood’s shelter

  heeding

  the chants of Algonquin capped by those scalps full of bees

  and Dominican co-eds from Harvard

  whose grandmothers reach safe-haven because of debts

  with their desiccated saint

  sleeping among relics

  on Cabrini Boulevard

  when we grow old in the Hudson

  no longer do we hear stories of

  elected assemblywomen, queens who rarely prove inexpensive

  in the journey of tribes

  bartering with other tribes

  Mr. Al-Yanabi—Sabbaghi’s friend from Casablanca, friend of Gasca now

  a translator, grand detourneur de mots of the Chaima

  of Itúrburo, the one from Guayaquil

  of Tenreiro

  from La Coruña—has forgotten me

  disappearing with today’s men

  where we live

  unless I were to speak to his birds

  if they would fly back

  once his war is over

  Francisco Arévalo every morning

  THE HUNTER AND HIS HOUNDS WHEN THEY TAKE THEIR REST IN THE SHRINES

  The tired ones go to rest on Syriac’s fragments

  trying to get some sleep

  they set out in pilgrimage through the world collecting pebbles

  in search of decent shade

  a good woman

  a laconic poet, a prophet of whales,

  unemployed

  before he’s hungry

  an ephemeral shelter sighted among rosebushes

  with a book on migration on his shoulders

  he is the first to leave

  scattered letters reveal themselves one afternoon

  in his mind

  they turn into larvae

  and dust

  given to the miraculous tumors

  extracted from trees

  live gills used in writing

  lyrics chewing on trees which unsettle us

  sold in its lyric-wrapper this painkiller

  this poem

  give me

  stones or the flesh of dates

  fast food swirling in the stomach of those trained

  to remember well

  which harms us

  we step away from training paths

  we are no longer summer’s leisure

  serving a pleasant poet

  on break from negotiations at the hour

  of free admission

  the last of the overgrown almond trees

  the girls flitting there

  expert beaks first start scraping

  at my hands which time has cracked open

  under a well-lit frame you awaken with a stroke

  we adjust our lenses, the leaves used for our pain, aiming with my cell phone

  against the carelessness of guards I fire between your eyes

  you are in my network

  And now you are not

  and you turn me into a literary journalist

  posting with fury

  like religious tourists who make the stones speak

  while strengthening their legs and the muscle of faith

  topical is the healthy experience of the diverse

  fawning over portals, confessionals

  the closest utopia

  of manners and faces and cu
linary habits

  the dogma of the Virgin Odigitria or iconoclastic persecutions

  our device receives blank messages

  and also

  exhausts you

  THIS CENTURY , GALERY EXPERTS DISCOVER, WITH THE USE OF INFRARED CAMERAS, A NEW SKETCH BY DA VINCI BENEATH THE MADONNA OF THE ROCKS

  “It was an extraordinary moment when we shone the camera on the

  Madonna’s face and instantly we saw a hand which had no place there”

  statement made by female expert to the British daily

  The Gaurdian

  when we are more or less sober

  the first of July

  the BBC flirts with the artist’s regret

  let’s reveal a woman on her knees

  with her arm extended

  Prompting a beginning

  these are the last of human lines

  curators are called in urgently

  the galleries

  carry the fragrance of the market

  sniffing at the artists

  offering them a post in this death

  that must be earned as we earn

  life

  by summer’s perfumed air: you take it or you leave it

  FOUR

  MESSAGE NETWORKS

  (AUREA AND THE VOICES)

  To one’s ears night in Beirut could sound beautiful. But you step out of the scene and come across Saida Baida wherever love seizes you. Cheikha Remetti’s breath is hoarse as I came across her in Paris she, coming from Oran and I, on my way there, go ahead, I pursue you.

  When the cage’s unlatched and she steps out like an arctic vixen, groomed, quick, dangerous, and flush as an artery, she is the lover of a bride who dances for her. Remitti won’t mind the cost of the ride or if I am a poor singer, I follow you home. Remmetez, remmetez, Saida Baida, I am at the Stalingrad Bar, a simple sehakia who’s never been to Mecca, without an orchestra of medahates.

  Ahá, ahá

  ehm, ehm

  another round for all of us

  Oh my mother dressed for

  El Wali’s visit

  teach me the way, let me sing

  whoever knows love has known death

  (FALSE) MEMORIES OF NINA BERBEROVA

  Altagracia will marry and leave her child to the care of Munira

  who invited Alina, the noble one, for a dinner of dry fish

  in the custom of their grandmothers in Campechuela

  Akhmatova on the cut glass of a frozen river

  when Altagracia made a Russian poet melt

  Akhmatova of Neva, Altagracia calls her daughter Nevanina

  —her Dominican ways

  that river never rid my mother

  out

  from death as a wintry

  scandal

  don’t think

  Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova in Neva

  is a broken link

  beatings on ice

  like a swan

  As Katherine Manfield

  and Marina Tsvetaeva

  her last words

  were for a Russian lover

  I fear the love of her blue eye shadow

  smoking

  saved

  in a fresh tomb

  I am alive, so what? blushing

  at your urgency

  I walk the mangrove of this newborn island

  a Bejuca serpent conjured by household witches

  another branch softly binds to my legs

  with that cannibalistic manner

  of latitudes set to simmer

  by dusk’s air

  the strain Munira knows all too well, on my bed

  without morbid cult for a hormonal spell that lasts all night

  induced

  or neglected

  without

  the confusion of the living on the opposite sidewalk

  when I close my eyes the white animal on the train

  with its white climates

  takes me to the jeweler of the red river

  a chest with Ophelias

  prompting traffic

  from north to south on the Hudson we learn to dance

  with Mambí

  and

  a poem by Mandelstam turn us into romantics

  with decency

  at Yale

  but Akhmatova

  —Munira, the brilliant one, often weeps

  while caring for Nevanina, and because of the great Berberova, her example of

  impeccable errancy

  alas, if Akhmatova

  if Tsvetaeva if Mandelstam, if Sabbaghi

  would have managed to swim here

  without tartan grandparents

  nor translations of Leopardi

  nor a Berber mother reciting Rosalía’s verse

  fishing for a morsel, like Nina Nikolayevna Berberova did so to

  to make room in this river when the Seine left her on a boat again

  made old

  in no time—by the grace of the holy women who follow her everywhere

  she fell in love again, became a professor of notable Russian

  poetry, not far from the Hudson

  by Neva’s fires

  the widening eyes of the Neva River

  like fish sent back

  yes

  DELETE

  (THE FRESH SAINT)

  Pineal body, hypothalamus or third eye, I pick at your brain to understand you

  Located on top of the diencephalon, between the cranial colliculi, in an area called the pineal fossa, this gland is activated by the absence of light

  if ours were a love story

  I would give you my third eye

  my kidneys which filter you out

  a bunch of weeds I would bring you from the field

  and I, the zombie

  I, your junkie

  without searching or waiting

  long-lived larvae of the placebo’s portal

  rats in love

  in this broth of Wiki

  the encyclopedia of my tales of creatures hung

  around the neck of my frozen one

  SEND

  (THE EMBALMED ONE)

  I don’t know what to tell you

  you wear too much makeup on your face

  before you were queen of a bear’s hive

  now a dead bee

  much later

  a girl aged then another and another infanta

  with a costly inferno to your hips

  Greek up to the hilt

  that Callas note coursing through the cliffs

  with a string of gray pearls

  as a warning

  Sappho

  lays opens her winter coat

  expensive legs

  severed at the exact place

  and where I see a woman resting on my shoulder

  asking for a tale

  while a drop takes partial effect because it brings us

  love

  I don’t know what to tell you

  you will crush roots

  swallow pearls

  become a broken record

  got to leave her in peace

  while your blood draws close to mine

  bones drawn to its metal

  I see her loom large in the grass

  Melissa flowers for maidens

  stoned to death by the Goddess’ silence

  in my cup

  beneath her colorful resin

  hands pressing the wombs of the rats in the city

  protein from bad days

  I dig

  oblivion the ring

  the precious stone

  indeed my love

  a gene weakens ideas or blood or the breasts

  of white pets with the cure

  female amputees with healthier brains

  also face it

  time spent on x-rays

  weeping

  feeling like stray dogs

  they are food

  for a dragon with a pink ribbon
r />   washed red

  by health campaigns

  our working bones now stunned as

  they follow you

  retouching your Pharaoh eyes with eyeliner

  gently, I shut the sarcophagus

  I watch over your dream

  INTERVIEW OF THE MADONNA OF HODEGETRIA, THE ONE OF THE ARROW

  in ancient times, so-called melancholy ones, they have gone after torches

  let’s talk about the road

  in a hollow, we used to tell stories

  about

  salt grounds being torn apart and we found no roots for our supper

  or it is the hour to take flight, I only think to tell stories

  suppose that you and I

  collected tumors

  for expensive tinctures

  you, busy with rosebushes

  that there are still libraries and brothels for sleepless women who rattle

  their household crickets

  that

  wood and the stone and the dead body of the forest keep you there

  made dead

  eternally young

  that

  one day you will sit still, without drama

  between scrapings of letters and the fuzz of Egyptian vegetables

  that you will bring to life the eyes the hip the day

  calling yourself the Virgin who sews together drops that other girl

  the throat the mouth the tongue

  who also licks the hand of the wind

  and leave your shelter guided by vigilant spirits

  who file

  lovingly

  your fangs

  like the daughter of Cioran the humorist, and Simone Buoé the one who laughed

  with Cioran

  the one who showed the mercy

  of a vampire poet with pallid light

  of ascetics shuttered in heroic pantheons like the fallen stones

  of the moon

  and you climb up

  to the world

  Suppose

  you’ve abandoned love-hate’s language

  and put

  the saint in her place

 

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