The word and the clinamen

I

Poetry crashes into the clinamen of the page.
And so I run like a blind train and get impaled by time.

Before I sailed from the zenith to the nadir of the body
pinned to its vertical axis beside the void.
It was the rose. All wet.

Now it is only the root, and suddenly the whole tree.
And the dryness of the branch. And the unnameable mucilage.

II

In the prose goes the fire
and phoenix
to the burning thought
comes the wing of poetry

and later it flies toward the eyes’ fire
and floods in the darkness:
blindness, muteness and a hollowed out poem.

I could barely throw the voice’s stone to the ground.

The body’s root trembles
and the split word remains on the branch.

Then,
I am a tree, naked.

Poet reading aloud

To open the wasteland word for word,
Open ourselves and look toward the opening that signifies (…)
Ida Vitale

(De Trema)

Barely bowed
the head shines in its steadfastness
with a lit eye. 

Beside the book a hand holds
the other hand takes flight, comes and goes, trembles,
opens the enormous door
where poetry enters

up toward the mouth,
entwined branches where birds flutter,
supple feathers that breath ripples
in the flooded well of the poem.
Written, the word dug the well
for the body of the poem
born like a child.

Now the book is open
with the voice’s gifts
that offer refuge to writing, 

and to reading,
the being that is opened.

And he teaches the lesson

Given the provisions for living …
the grandmother takes life’s journey full of nothings …
Tatiana Oroño

(De Estuario)

I have read the poem to Marco
and he knew how to point out his name’s letters one by one
in the water of the mirror of my eye

and he repeated the rhyme
trilling in amazement
at the correspondences
leaving a little bird inside my head.

May it live in my eye and trill in my tree
and receive in verse
the provisions for living.

Then, may it read,
see the shining water of the poem,
its meaning in the lovely bower of letters.

Be the tall flower that holds up my tree.

Translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas

Photo: Uruguayan writer Mariella Nigro.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a writer and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her translations include Love Poems by Idea Vilariño and The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is the Zona Gale Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jeannine Marie Pitas’s recent translations include Marosa di Giorgio’ Carnation and Tenebrae Candle (Cardboard House Press, 2020) and Selva Casal’s We Do Not Live In Vain (Veliz Books, 2020). Her co-translation, with Jesse Lee Kercheval, of Memory Rewritten by Mariella Nigro is forthcoming from White Pine Press.