Five Silhouettes by Pura López Colomé, Translated by Dan Bellm


 
 
                                   –with music by Samuel Zyman

I. Vintage

Only you,
your I,
your you,
be what it may,
be who you are,
going
lost
deep into childhood’s vineyard:

may hail not strike it,
may the cawing of omen not burn it,
may no intruding hand come near
or prowler dare
to harvest before its time:
that its seedless fruit
taste
but not know
of the bitter,
know
but not taste
of the sweet.
 
 
II. Vine

So may they be and know:
parabola, vine-shoot,
roots of air, curls of green,
lines alive as vines.
Night-scent of jasmine,
pansy,
open-heart,
dandelion,
tigerlily,
foxtail,
queen of the meadow,
you, the meadowsweet;

may absences
as they faint away
live,
being
forgetting.
Only you,
your lonely I,
unscathed Whoever,
incorporeal.
Now you are
who you
are.
 
 
III. Fluvial

Not the pebble
that hurled itself
from your banks
but the one that sprang
time and again
along the flood,
fixed in origin,
dry point,
solitary crystal
core.
Abandoned
pupil of an eye,
black hole.
 
 
IV. Evocation

Recall, record
the tight
rope,
the cord, the enclave
become concordant
without recourse
to any noose
around the neck,
simple
slip knot,
spring
less
time
piece:

a seraph’s
feet
on the scroll,
and that shaman’s prayer:
memory,
mortal me...

Now I fall
against my will
among its loose
threads,
no cloth,
no net,
no thing.
 
 
V. Exposed to the wind

There was once
a once that was a time,
solitary swings
left on their own:
who it was who was
and would come
and look back
at the sky
to a time
and a time
would turn round,
endlessly
echoing.
And what if I let
myself step
between those ropes?
Would it be
the end of me
to recognize
myself
in the rememberer?

 
 
 

Pura López Colomé, one of Mexico’s most acclaimed contemporary poets, has published eleven volumes of poetry, most recently Lieder: Cantos al oído, cantos al olvido (Hearing and Forgetting) (2012), and Poemas reunidos (Collected Poems): 1985-2012 (2013). In 2008, she was awarded Mexico’s most prestigious poetry prize, the Premio Xavier Villarrutia. Previous work in English includes No Shelter (Graywolf) and Watchword (Wesleyan), both translated by Forrest Gander. López Colomé has also published Spanish translations of work by Samuel Beckett, H.D., Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and others. She lives with her family in Cuernavaca, Morelos.

 

Dan Bellm teaches literary translation in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Recent and forthcoming books of poetry in translation are: Description of a Flash of Cobalt Blue (Unicorn Press, Greensboro, NC, 2015) and Nostalghia (La Diéresis, Mexico, DF, 2015), both by Mexican poet Jorge Esquinca, and Song of the Dead (Black Square/Brooklyn Rail, New York, 2016) by French poet Pierre Reverdy. He has also published three books of poetry, most recently Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press), winner of the 2009 California Book Award. He lives in Berkeley, California. www.danbellm.com