Afterword
This poem was written in response to a letter to Adán from Celia Paschero, an associate of Jorge Luis Borges, who was coming to Lima to do research for her doctoral thesis, Contemporary Peruvian Poetry. The letter read:
The reason for this letter? Apart from wanting to express my affection for you, I have another goaclass="underline" to request information about your life, information told, if possible, with all the spice you know how to sprinkle on everything you say and write. I have proposed writing an article about you for La Nacion. I have just started publishing with them, and I want to write one that is human, through which your blood and skin can be felt. I know this whole business might be loathsome to you. But in the name of the warmth there has been between us since the first moment we met, of the affection I feel and of my profound admiration for you, please agree to my request. Leave aside all your bohemianism and pour it all out to me and. speak to me about yourself. Can you?
Written Blindly
You want to know about my life?
I know only of my footsteps,
of my weight,
of my sadness
and my shoe.
Why ask who I am, where I’m going?
Because you know plenty about the Poet, the harsh
and sensitive volume of my human self,
which is my body and vocation,
nonetheless.
If I was born,
the Year remembers my birth,
but I don’t remember,
because I live, because I kill myself.
My Angel isn’t a Guardian Angel,
my Angel is of Satiety
and Remnants,
and carries me endlessly,
stumbling, always stumbling
in this dazzling shadow
that is Life
and its deceit
and its charm.
When you know everything.
When you know not to ask.
but to chew instead
on your mortal fingernail,
then I will tell you my life,
which is no more than one more word.
The whole of your life is like each wave:
knowing how to kill,
knowing how to die,
and not knowing how to tame plentitude,
and not knowing how to wander and then return to the source,
and not knowing how to hold longing.
If you want to know about my life
go look at the Sea.
Why do you ask me, Learned One?
Don’t you know that in the World,
everything gathers from nothing,
from withering immensities,
nothing but an eternal trace
barely a shadow of desire?
The real task, if that’s what you’d take on,
is not to understand life but to imagine it.
The real isn’t captured: it is followed,
and that’s what dreams and words are for.
Beware its shortcuts.
Beware its distances.
Beware its crags.
Beware its herds.
Who am I?
I am what I am,
ineffable and innumerable,
the figure and soul of rage.
No, that was at the end. and at the beginning
before the beginning began.
I am a body of subdued fury
and sullen irony.
No, I am not one who seeks the poem,
not even life.
I am an animal hunted by its own being,
which is a truth and a lie.
My being is so simple, and so choked,
a sting of nerves and flesh.
I was looking for another,
and that’s been my search for myself,
I’ve never wanted, and don’t want now, to be me,
but rather another who was saved
or who will be,
not one of Instinct, who gets lost,
or of Understanding, who retreats.
My day is a different day,
some days I don’t know where to put myself,
I don’t know where to go in my jungle
among my reptiles and my trees,
my books and mortar
and neon stars
and women who close around me like a wall,
or like no one. or like a mother,
and the newborn who cries over me
and through the streets,
all the wheels, primal and real.
Such is the whole of my days,
till my last afternoon.
The Other, that Neighbor, is a ghost.
Is there air you breathe that chokes you
and recreates you,
breathing your inane body?
No! Nothing is more than the endless surprise
of finding yourself again,
always you, the same you, between the same walls
of distances and streets.
And of skies, those roofs
that never kill me because they never collapse!
I never gain the fury of the divine
or the sympathy of the human.
I’m this way without regret.
That’s not how I feel.
By day I am the Loner,
and the Absolute of Zoology, if I think about it,
or like a ferocious carnivore, if I take hold.
Am I the Creature or the Creator?
Am I Matter or Miracle?
Your question is so much mine, so alien. Who am I?
Do you think I know?
But no, the Other doesn’t exist,
only I, in my terror and orgasm!
With all my dreamed-again dreams
and all the coins collected
and all my body
resurrected after every coitus,
blind, futile, eyeless.
When you’re no more than being
and if you reach the age of dying
and when you truly know
where life and death cross.
Then I will tell you who I am,
certainly, and without a voice, my friend!
The pure animals who speak to you
heal themselves with potent herbs,
there, among immaterial stones.
the world of the real, and human sciences,
where supposed foul-smelling boys
have had fun with a ball.
Yes, life is delirium.
and yet my nothingness
never was in this life, none of it.
but real, but blue
or volcanic.
How late Time comes to the moment of forgetting
and prudence.
It comes dragging along,
like a flood of clouds and earth and the human.
How one comes to oneself at the wrong time!
How unforeseen and desperate is every now,
every I that collapses with Time,
never always and always never.
Eternal unsleeping dawn
in which I resolve myself to my deeds
and my thinking!
Loneliness is a hard rock
against which the Air is hurled,
it’s in every wall of the City,
complicit and hiding.
I hurl myself again and again, ceaselessly,
I am my hazard, my creating.
Poetry, my friend,
is inexhaustible, incorrigible, indwelling.
It is the infinite river,
all blood, all meandering, all ruin,
dragging along what we live.
What is the Word
but a vain and varied shout?
What is the image of the Poetic
but a log moving quickly beneath the nullity of a cat?
It’s all a flood
and if it weren’t
nothing would be real.
nothing the same.
Love knew only