Gastón Fernández’s hermetic collection of 100 psalm-like poems marks the English-language debut of this legendary Peruvian writer of the late twentieth century. Fernández lived most of his adult life in Belgium, working as an art historian. While publishing his scholarship mostly in French, he produced literary works semi-secretly in his native Spanish. Shared only with close friends, very few of these works were published in his lifetime. Apparent Breviary is his lone collection of poems, notable as much for their silences as what they say, their use of negative space as a counterweight to speech, and the hallucinatory effect of their sequence.
10
Yesterday I supposed
once again you would
turn
your head so we could talk —
(the hand loses feeling
left for too long
on the breast
and desire is a short time
In the center chance
remains,
noises by chance
remade. Turn around
death
stands there
does not tremble,
does not move)
11
I’m not the
mute one
reality spills, her,
on reversed eyes
on the lip’s back
The wind.
The book. Spilling eyes.
Lord,
why if not the nonetheless
if hope spills over buildings if
hands grasp
contain
air
footnote asking if
clarity is
really
12
The bird is
fire,
veins
eyes, hollow heading
upward
being: life precipitates an inert flow
in weight and soul is air
a book
a trace
I am not
speech
13
Right over there
I’d rather go forehead first
The temple mount is short
The hair’s peak is short
and if I speak
I lose.
And if I talk
about the bodies—
That darkness
that house
the way the birds gaze!
14
Rage is a noun
Either know a poet in a book Or put
one’s conscience on
a cloud. Place a
patriarch on one’s lips,
wipe a revolution from my
lips
(To murder man, to organize
the body with the goal of understanding
the cold
the weapon
death to the phoneme so there will be no
death and
murder man
no reason
no prose
no poem
15
Let there be derision
Let it be read
Pass from magazine to face,
from page to precise universal
vengeance, because derision
centers in the mouth
between pores of
letters travels on
fingers
promoting proposing to figure myself
among the stones
incorporate myself to begin again
birds sex
time
Translated by KM Cascia