Three poems

Translated from Spanish by Elena Barcia

Social Classes

The poor are princes who must reconquer their kingdom.

Agustín Díaz-Yanes, Nobody Will Talk About Us When We’re Dead

When he was six years old, my father worked

from spring to spring.

From sunrise to sunset he cared for animals.

The foreman tied him to a rope

so he wouldn’t get lost in the ditches,

in the branches of the olive trees, in the streams,

in the winter frost of the gullies.

When it grew dark, he pulled him back easily,

returning him white as snow,

bruised, his hands

trembling and blistered,

and a tangle of abandonment

in the fragile walls

of his pink lungs

and his tiny heart.

In his last years he became a child again.

He remembered the proletarian cold,

(now embedded in his bones),

the scent of sage, the first silent film,

and the bread with olive oil at the hour of the Angelus,                                                                                  

the hour of mock nutrition.

But his master, who was kind,

with his leather boots and rain gloves,

took him once, in a horse-drawn carriage,

to the doctor. He does not remember the trip.

When they withdrew him from the carriage he had no pulse,

his fever was above 104 degrees,

and he was about to die,

my father, six years old, of that pneumonia.

My father, six years old.

The Inheritance

The inconsolable cold of the poor.

Affluence is not enough to blanket the cold

inherited in the genes and born from rubble.

No firewood can melt that much embryonic snow.

We light fireplaces. We knit a sun with wool,

a closetful of suns, illusory fabric.

We acquire down comforters like a bird’s nest.

And the cold, underneath, remains.

From the marrow the subcurrent of ice returns

to cover my eyes like dried blood.

Now everything is blackness, glacier, and blood.

A euthanizing river thickens in my veins,

the brutal abandonment of a paternal hand,

the brothers lost in the haste of a bridge.

Congenital illness watches me, simmering.

It mocks my flight when I change my name

and usurp the rights of another’s life.

Now everything is scar, hospital, and scorpions.

You withstand the barrios, the whiteness

of the lice and the infusions. You learn the customs.

You gain access to the office, the clothes, the warmth,

to the cushioning heat of bodies.

And yet the cold remains.

The Lice

When I return from a trip,

stained by the trains’ migration,

towering because of the height of the flights,

it seems that home, this home of mine,

has allowed itself to be invaded by woodworm,

and next to each object there are small piles

of yellow dust or flecks of a pill,

like dry tears, traces of semen,

rancid powder of a banned book,

old snow or fossilized hail.

Like the dirty snow that some children

have in their hair, I myself a toddler,

I myself, blond hair splattered

with larvae at the moment they hatch.

Cold lice of an abandoned child, contamination

and sick dandruff

learning to read at three parasitic years,

my lice learning like me

that alphabet common to human vermin.

My lice learning addition and subtraction,

multiplying their eggs: our mane sparkles.

In short, that snow receives me, the salt

of a southern swamp banished to my house.

The woman in her deepest soul receives me,

the rage of my shadow, combatant,

the vulva and its statutes not yet obeyed.

My attachment to lemons welcomes me

and the bluing of white clothes.

And also a pinch of madness,

the harsh unlikelihood of another life,

another life of patios and lilies.

I want to return then to cities

foreign and utopic, rebellious streets,

so as never to cheapen the dream.

And go back to the most remote campfires

a time when we lived wildly

in damp caves, gathering fruits

and firewood, woman sapiens of the Neolithic,

covered with the hides of the hunt,

when as iron oxide artists,

almost domesticated humans,

we painted our most primal scenes.

Let the future erect distance

while hyenas devour fresh cadavers.

Both my cruelty and my egotism are such

that sometimes I forget my own heart beats,

and then, psychopathic, I desire an evil

that shames me even to say it:

Let lice hatch in the heads of others.