bruno darío
viewing room
Two poems translated from the Spanish by Kit Schluter
August
I dreamt I received your letter in the black envelope you told me to look out for. Yes. I walked in on tiptoes through the parking lot of a building from the nineties; to one side, a cement virgin bathed in a hypnotic kind of dew was holding the object. I pressed it to my chest. I could feel my heart at the tip of each of my organs. I stuck my breath on the envelope and ran to my door, which was transparent and had no lock or corners. My trapezoidal bedroom, with a river running through its center, gave the feeling of living in some older period: no word could describe that place. Hastily, I tore open the envelope and emptied it out. A folded sheet and a small red pencil sharpener. The letters on the thick, plush paper went more or less like this:
This letter will never arrive, I’m sorry. Maybe I never sent it and I only wanted your thighs to weigh you down from so much waiting, from so many spiders. You’ll want one single word, a photograph to contain my secret, but it’s too late now. I’ve become unrecognizable. Ah, if only you could see me, you’d fall right in. You offered me so much of everything... And I took nothing. The red book you gave me when we were on the riverbank before you now is the only thing that brings us together. You can imagine in what esteem I hold you. In what chunk of spaceless forgetting, with nothing to hold that happy time when we ran and rolled around the Pendiente Empredrada. Nothing went unnoticed. I loved you, it’s true, that night when you missed the last train home and we went back where the party was happening, but only because I’d misjudged the cost of my affection.
A vine has started to grow in my house. On my skin, moss. Breathing appeals to me less and less. Not because I want to die; just that it’s a pleasure not to use much oxygen. Not to use much of anything. I’ve sent you the pencil sharpener so you can sharpen your poems like you used to sharpen your pencil with an elementary school fear, watching how the wood curled into ribbons, and you wondered if that blade would provoke the same effect on your skin.
Trembling then, still in dreams, hallucinating passages from Werther and The Little Mermaid, I stuck my tongue into the hole of that object and, painlessly, thin little strips began fluttering out, while drops of blood trickled down upon the letter.
I woke up, drenched in tears, when they knocked on the door. It was the Jehovah’s Witnesses—neither discreet nor refined—, and they wanted to talk to me about primitive Christianity. I told them I’d do so only if they took me out for ice cream. They left.
The letter was nothing. It wasn’t even a letter; there was no letter and no envelope—only wind blowing through my dream. I imagine how you’ll look when you’re an old woman.
Once a Trip with North Wind
Cloud cover set to darken the beach
—explosion on the fringe; pronounced gusts,
I mean it, sliver crests of spume,
mutating grains of sand into tiny
whips snuck into pillows
and swimsuits—; the cold spies
on my beloved’s sad braid:
hand me the towel, and dries herself off
—a gelid squall looming—.
Saline bits shake the taste buds;
wobbling, aimless droplets rise
and fall: hydraulic dance,
interaction!; change of state, and in the personality,
an absence the color of a different blood:
nourishment from branches, lightning, and veins.