Pedro de Jesús

That year’s 21st of June

Translated from the Spanish by Dick Cluster

Disappointed because his poetry
amounted but to personal lacerations
oozing pathetic or ironic
testimony into verse
whose prosody scanned so often
like powdered nutmeg in a recipe
for exotic cuisine.
He eviscerated the enormous carp
—gift from the lover—
evading emotions with skillful
movements of the knife,
and expelled the fish’s meager blood,
and sliced
its flesh for lunch
without looking at the scratches
on the fisherman’s muddy legs
or the impenitent sun on his face.
Then while they chewed, one facing the other,
his eyes fled the lover’s fingers
mortified by the line.
Only when the fisherman reproached him
for so much silence,
did he stop resisting and take his hands,
kiss him and stroke his legs and face,
while murmuring,
disjointed,
the words laceration, impenitent, prosody,
which, to the lover, seemed
a wholly original way of offering thanks,
or confessing love,
or inviting it.