Featured in this issue Migrations / Migraciones
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Available from Junction Press. See Feature for details.
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Photo of Gloria Gervitz by Garciela Iturbide
Photo of Mark Schafer by
Marjorie Attignol Salvodon
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For more information on Mark Schafer’s new translation of
the work of David Huerta, Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poetry of
David Huerta, go to www.beforesaying.com
Gloria Gervitz
V Equinox
Fires
burn in my heart.
No smoke rises.
No one knows.
Kenneth Rexroth
I moan for love
Before my birds
They are also caged
Geisha Song
. . .is the shipwreck then a harvest,
does tempest carry the grain for thee?
Gerard Manley Hopkins
out of what severance does the offering come?
monotonous
petals of water
flapping wings
sundering
splinters
and that billowing swell beneath my skin
bolt of syllables
before June
before the rain
saudades
it rains
an initiation
as if she had drunk hemlock
she lets her do it
watches her do it
water bursts into
the passageways of her scream
close to the sobbing
the quick drop
flowing
in disarray
and the body opens
offers itself
in the vulnerable darkness of abandonment
your quick fingers full of mercy
bending legs
the obliging body
severed branch
scent of freesia
a headlong fall
from the deepest of places
I am shattering
chalice
no one
pure flight
the dry flow
flowers a dam
the body beyond all measure
and she said
dark are my clothes
and you who surmounts me
darkest
but it is I who pass all limits
like a lengthening stain
like a raised fist
burning to the orphan’s core
howling
like a split ceiba
the grievous passion
I’m barely trembling now
or did my trembling become a plea?
in this silence
opens me like a furrow
she-wolf
flesh of dreams
could fear be
the pinnacle?
and it drops
between me
and myself
in that January lull
on its slope
a plea a gash
a dislocation
in this yellow landscape
there in that well
in that mirror of the flesh
on the edges where I lie
in my aloneness
and drops
to where it hurts
arching
swaying
and the exuberant
plunge
opens this flesh
and the eager
body
dares not refuse
swallows drop like stones
from the towering abyss
these words
beneath your weight
the hand sinks under the gaze
and the body surrenders
Translated from the Spanish by Mark Schafer
