Paulina Vinderman
Translated from Spanish by John Oliver Simon
The Wharf (II)
Again the cupolas of Buenos Aires in her poem.
Journeys become copies
of cities touched only by survival,
to return to my own city.
As if she contained all the numbers, the secrets,
the passions of the world.
Sometimes a street gives me back the desert
and at twilight,
the shadows of the garbage bags
are museum installations I can only perceive
when my exhausted memory forgets the ocean, those cranes
behind the fences, the woman in the blue turban who
sold me the magic box and the chance
to treasure up my fears like butterflies trapped
in their golden beauty.
One must learn suffocation like learning a language.
No one will weep for a lack of wings against the sky.
Return from the Voyage (III)
I return from the rain forest to my pale winter
and everything seems to be just as I left it.
It’s still cold, and the light
is a stripe of the flag opening slightly
toward springtime.
There’s a group of fatalistic plants,
a mute telephone, and the pages of the patient
half-finished novel.
“What’s out there anyway?”
The world.
Even if the world is a truck stuck in red mud,
a table in the jungle of Darien.
The truck-driver talks all night of strike-it-rich
schemes (dark rebellions)
while a pair of hens picks at my dreams
and the moon is part of an amorphous constellation,
crusted with exile,
shining like fury, like faith, like misfortune.
A gleam which persists in the spotted stones
I spread out on the table of a musicless living room.
Oh, they seem as vivid and as ransacked
as Cezanne’s apples on the wall.