Editor’s Note: These poems come from a sequence of sixteen poems that Silvia Goldman and Mary Hawley have written back and forth to each other. In this collaboration, one of them writes a poem in her preferred language (Spanish for Silvia, English for Mary); the other translates it into English or Spanish and writes a new poem in response.
expulsion
the wind is a long vowel
she doesn’t hold herself together she happens
on the side of a conversation that has her
she trades the feel of the plates
for the edges of something better
she expels the mother
but keeps her hair
she thinks that reading isn’t enough
subjects herself to that thought
to the vowels that bring it
over here
to the preposition of in a phrase that
no longer belongs to her
and in her finger she carries out the long assassination
of the longest flesh
she knows that speaking and reading come from the extreme that is the mouth
she clings to the mouth but denies it is extreme
she shrivels
she lives below
she sees the top of the tree she uses to make the gestures
she later leaves behind
she carries her ups and downs so the mouth
that closes her remains intact
she has no days to return
Silvia Goldman
translated by Mary Hawley
lost
no tiene días para volver
a girl is lost more easily than a woman
flat water
black highway
what happens
what happened
is a story
told by the crushed grasses, thinning fog
nothing really vanishes, remember, into thin air—
darkness under a curved blade of moon
rustling cattails and a chorus of frogs
where am I to go
where did I go
tunnel under a road
an underworld
to go and return
given up by the dead
return by water
a mirrored shining above
the wreck of a ship below
fish swimming in and out
of a barnacled cabinet
that once held maps
now undulating fibers
inks leached away
no longer tools of navigation
Mary Hawley
a second house
A girl is lost more easily than a woman
We already told you about that woman
Now imagine you’re what is said by that woman
about the thick air that sometimes kills her
Now, that you’re the one who talks about that woman and you say this woman
this woman is inside a house that’s about to burn and you say
the loss of the house isn’t as important as the loss of this woman
Now imagine her legs are flowers that adorn the air
and you smell them
that you set them inside a longing to see her
that this longing is a second house,
a fountain, a lick of flame.
Now imagine you talk to that woman
which suggests a connection between you and the first house about to burn
but you do nothing
this could be an efficient definition of guilt
now imagine you are that woman
and you talk to the woman you are
that you don’t run
that around your legs you set
a fountain, a lick of flame, a longing to see her
but not burning up in the first house.
Silvia Goldman
translated by Mary Hawley
after rain
ahora imaginate que vos sos esa mujer
que le hablás a la mujer que sos
que no corrés
dark tendrils coil around the heart
thicken to vines between us and the world
despair on the edge of every scene—the picnic,
the rainbow, the discovered nest
sometimes everything fades into a sky
so bright it is blank, a void
or a canvas
these days are still full of color
the trees full of birds
the night full of stars
the house full of mice
after rain the trees are raining
a shower of silver in full sun
what other living thing could hold our sorrow
and then release it
Mary Hawley
