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© Harm Erkov, Beyond Desire
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Your terse word denotes the description of the excited man...*
Excited about something as intangible as the imagination,
Waiting for something as harmful as chance.
Longing to love himself again
And by loving the shapeless desire, the world sinks.
As the tragic error, oh horrors,
Desire instills every minute of waiting
To again become a mockery of all adversity.
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© 2010 David Lago-Gonzalez
© Kurt Findensein, translation
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*Roger Salas
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Another man gets away,
a man is always getting away, as far from the shore
as a shipwreck survivor adrift on his raft,
under the umbrella he improvised in his hunger to survive
a sea that devours him from within and without.
The man that gets away,
is forever gathering up his gear,
the diminutive poetry that shapes his life,
the gravity of the mystery that bears him to that remoteness
from which he surveys the receding shore,
a distance beyond any possible return by the currents.
The choppy waters, a mouth that swallows his form and shadow,
make of a man a sand dune that builds up and is submerged.
He and the shoreline never meet: a man who always leaves
and a shore that seems to remain when in reality it withdraws
phantasmagorically, like a huge frigate under a monarch’s command.
The man, although loving the will to live more than life itself,
realizes that the gates through which he can start his new world,
the island he observes and that observes him,
will likewise be a drop of water from the sea,
a fleeting slap of light beneath the waves.
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© David Lago-Gonzalez, 1975.
© Kurt Findensein, translation, 2008.
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Conserve enough
to get up in the morning
for the courage to put your eyes back in their sockets
and see the last light of summer filtering through the leaves
of the plants on the balcony
like a vine that leaps into the room and grabs onto
your feet,
climbing upward in search of a heart.
Put aside just enough
To stick your nose near the chimney and sniff,
I say “just enough” because the scent of orange trees
no longer wafts there
and, if you insist on breathing in, a black soot
like an undesirable ointment that is old-age’s passing
insists on blooming within those nares
that some day, less than professional hands will snuff.
Save up so much more than you can imagine
by not wasting Super Glue along the neckline
after you figure out the exact place to stick the ears
that will open their frozen-stiff auricles, those sensors
of the sublime murmur letting you pass
above the empty noise that nothingness produces when it travels
the length and breadth of your body over and over again.
Set aside a goodly amount of what it takes
to place your mouth upon the wound made by
your voice trying to rise above your chin,
and bite down hard, so that your teeth sink firmly into
your bones. That final, precise task is theirs,
to leave the expression with smile’s escape,
a possible quick exit when things get bad.
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© David Lago-Gonzalez, 2008
© translated by Kurt Findensein, 2008
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