Another Life, Daniel Lipara’s subtle and shimmering debut, is a family history, an intimate epic, a travel story, and an initiation. Both meditative and cinematic, engaging both playfully and ardently with the Odyssey and Alice Oswald’s Memorial, this book chronicles a constellation of relatives pushed into the light by the centripetal force of death. Another Life is less elegy than eulogy, summoning a vibrant range of voices and tones—caustic, tender, solemn, ecstatic—to praise the many lives that fit inside each and every one of us.

Another Life is now out from Eulalia Books.

Jorge, the tiller

My father’s name is Jorge
proud man with long black hair his shirt unbuttoned on his chest
son of Francisco the Italian charterer
he lives in Mataderos
where the air smells of slaughtered cows
his surname is the island of Aeolus his first name he who tills the soil
he drives a cab
my mother hailed it fleeing her first husband
then I was born then Nadia
which means hope

his black dog
darted in the background
and hunted pigeons out behind my grandfather’s lemon tree
he trailed me let me clutch his fur that’s how I learned to walk
his name was Prometheus
old shepherd he’d wag his tail at the sight of my father
he couldn’t run to him his hind legs faltered
and darkness hunted him
behind the lemon tree

master griller
he taught me how to build a fire
with branches eucalyptus leaves bark shavings
the air snaps
we burn the meat fling entrails to the flames of leafless logs
and gusts of smoke bluster the grease into the sky
I’m six years old
we drive home as the evening
fills my eyes with sleep
the sky with stars

his father burned my father’s books
on this same grill
war broke out but he wasn’t called to fight
he drove a truck down south he had his Minotaur radio
and now Francisco’s dead his life
dashed off like wind

Jorge fought at home
sometimes he comes back and sleeps with my mother
the house smells of grilled meat like Aeolus’s island
and after the feast he washes down with wine
he roots around under the hood of the Taunus his hands slick
he pulls out parts and tubes and cables
and washes all that metal
like a hunter
who slits the belly of a wild boar
to draw its guts out gently trying not to scrape them
divides the lungs from heart from liver
and cleans the inside of the body

if Jorge the tiller were to come to Ezeiza Airport

Where
are Liliana’s arms
the white arms of my children says my father the tiller
he drove to Ezeiza in his black car
and searched until he found us sitting on our luggage
with my aunt and my mother waiting for
the flight to India
he took my hand my sister’s hand
what if something happens to you what would I do then
I’d crash the taxi turn to dust let the wind blow me away
and let my bones drift down to earth
I have no parents
Susana can go alone let her go see
Sai Baba let her travel to that tusk
suspended from the earth
over the black waters of the Indian Ocean
and now my sister spreads her arms wants him to pick her up
she’s frightened by the airport’s metal voice
my father laughs kisses her hair again and again
he shifts my sister to my mother’s arms my mother laughs and cries
lily blossom Liliana
she checks the screen
dark as the ocean floor
it’s boarding now Jorge it’s just a month
she touches the face
of my father he who tills the land who never plowed the skies
and who shows us the way
like puppies in a field
of wandering leaves
dispersed by wind

on the plane

Everyone’s asleep
as the vessel moves across the sea at night
and I
don’t know where I’m going or
what lonely stretch of water lies below
this South African Airways Airbus A320
the vessel where everyone sleeps
as the night and the ocean are the same

the air is simple darkness
and my mother and my sister
sleep is sleeping different if
your head is flying at six hundred miles an hour surrounded by air
and stars that spin and sound like engines
like a note ringing loud and clear
in the ears of the night

I don’t know where I’m going
Johannesburg New Delhi Bangalore Puttaparthi
I know the sea is down below
I saw it as the sun sank
veiled with shadow six hundred miles beneath
the gentle vessel
where sleep is light as fire
where clouds are born and wind and snow

and space shrills in our ears
like a mosquito

Translated by Robin Myers