Mario Meléndez
ARTE POÉTICA
Una vaca pasta en nuestra memoria la sangre escapa de las ubres el paisaje es muerto de un disparo La vaca insiste con su rutina su cola espanta el aburrimiento el paisaje resucita en cámara lenta La vaca abandona el paisaje continuamos escuchando los mugidos nuestra memoria pasta ahora en esa inmensa soledad El paisaje deja nuestra memoria las palabras cambian de nombre nos quedamos llorando sobre la página en blanco La vaca pasta ahora en el vacío las palabras están montadas sobre ella el lenguaje se burla de nosotros
LAST MINUTE PRECAUTIONS
Translated by Ron Hudson
I must be careful of the worms when they bury me most certainly they will speak badly of me they will spit on my poems and urinate on the fresh flowers that will adorn my tomb it may well be the case that they even devour my bones tear out my intestines or at the height of injustice rob my gold tooth and all this because in life never did I write about them
LET OUT THE INDIAN AMONG THE STONES
Translated by Ron Hudson
Let out the Guayasamín that each of us holds within let out the Indian among the stones, marrow to marrow the great precipice that we are, the great equatorial wound and that which falls from the eye to the sky, and that which wrinkles the air and that which comes out of ourselves like a deformed rose and that which itches most inside, let it out let out the thunder, the gust of wind, the bolt of lightning the furious and one-eyed thread that watches the soul bleed and here, in this burning jail that is this mourning America still are pending the names of those nailed hands of those hopeless feet, of those bones of smoke of that dream hurled into the great coffin of fear or simply of the tree with its infinitely dry branches Because we are not dead, we are not and there is one who now jumps over the sabers and there is one who drinks fire and carries wings of ash and there is one who splinters the river with his universal cranium and there is one who says I, I am the Indian among the stones And all the human horror is extinguished in my body And I have tears and misery And my heart like a drunken moon and my skeleton asleep, and my jaw stiff and at my ear roars the dog of the rotting nights and to my mouth rolls the kiss of the anguish that kills And I paint, I paint with my voice and with my packed fingernails I paint with my oxygen the scar of the wind I scratch the curséd stabbing of the centuries I submerge myself in the fatal acid of the Andean pupils I undress the memory of the gloomy skull and in me survive guts cut to the quick and each scream am I, each cheek born of the scream each fatal sigh and its needle origin each woman, each man each animal fallen in the dramatic spine each and every one of them And everywhere life like a bitter sun and I, inflated with colors close my wings and sleep on the sadness