El cutis patrio

Excerpts

Eduardo Espina

Blame Time on the Cathedrals
(A vulnerable factor for everyone else)

To the tall tiara of air between trills
toward the idea divided from the sky
or would it be better to assume it as it is
in the direction of what is there, guiding with
ornamented candor ceded by day to
invisibility without saving habitual
speech when no nor yet empty, it moves
to the mantis on such nomadic map
where the fastest mind advances
full of the same that appears to the
gaze, and by making shadow, awakens.





The Fog Discusses the Horse
(The incommensurable always wants to win)

The notion of the sorrel horse heals with a languid star.
Part of a breed against the knoll has wanted
for its branding to be lucky for a year.
Long ride, babbling nomenclatures.
In another era nicknames and few words,
established the mane for the cowboy.
Prosody given to endure, its illusion of existing,
moved the manure closer to the feeble plain,
that cadence of the unequal leaps.
From the silence a whinny broke loose,
expelled useful aftertastes through umbilical
limbo as it dissolves its troubles, captive, to be born
into so many of them when it would.
In Byzantium it sensed a century of syntax,
the pulse of spurs that came to it to stay.
And today, passing cleanly through the pause
the stampede asks permission of the birds,
learns to untangle the wounding river,
a river attracted at times to torn camalotes.
(He) without himself, like a superlative larch grove.
He and what he is (the length of them) a blazon
to yield to the embankment.
Along the coast, the quivering moon casts its light
with brutality because it has time:  no one circles the
sweaty odyssey, the round against the ungrateful
clay, the lawn less and even more
loving with many, as many as they now are,
they don't speak, they go free to the verb brandish
seeing it stiffen the sweetness, they tremble
in abundant invisibility for the taboo
tree, where determination aspired to the struggle
to the struggle that generally made them gigantic.
At the hour of the halos they'll desire that which is aerial,
desire now to be the orioles' air in the carob tree.
They could make a gesture, change locations
which would be a thought or insisting stubbornly
like a mind between the mount and master.
But it's the world for which they've come:
to be in the plains would be their mode of not speaking,
of finding the mare at the dip of some bay,
thus the truth of the stone was hearing its drama,
to cross through the storm though it bring it all
while behind the clover the symbolic display case
returned to make objections in the open air,
it had the wind for one or both, after
the native donkey was and roamed all summer
One yet but after more the evening would make legion
with a better image than Lope responding
with rain though the rain may be light.
The fly (fog, it doesn't speak) and the yellow
home of the lemon trees that look after it so that
even the immovable sea
starts to lose its strands, the melted mane.
Here, or maybe, it depends on the words.
Here to fulfill the vision that saw it
drawn, its from desire the yoked veneration.





The best of Magellan
(A strait poem)

Similar to what he would know to be
the sun's untimely appearance,
the chronicles gave an account
of finding another plot inside
the sirens that were not similar,
to what? the sky? to the light of
the earth in the day? but which one?
A universe comes there to hear,
having destiny as its inhabitant
of an extraordinary time.
With the halo of having known,
in vein that he could clearly see the wind
dancing La Bamba in a vibrant
voice like a waltz or a balsam
to pass the beautiful hours.
Left to their own devices, they'd be
beauties to better
the view so that
between the tide and the aroma
between the high tide and the energy
from the perfumes, evey month.
That man given to living at dawn
on the breeze in the clouds
came to artciulate, with such spirit
the way to watch King Momo
in more than one manner.
Beauties, bang, what a schmuck
to give in to jealousy to the flower
even if it didn't exist.
Which is how he took off, frightened, in his boat.
Over the sea he breathed
as he rushed towards the
pain of all ignorance:
in the half-masked cipher he wanted
to make sense of another shore.
Landscapes of absent skies
landscapes barely beginning
with the stilts of the snark.
A height for the treasures,
as a strange southern wind
yearned for the bath invited
for the good of immobility
by halves each time less
and awakened by an equal part.
Under certain laws of brilliance
the yesterday making itself beckon,
the era stained with sand.
The aura similar to money.
The sun attaches itself to its plan.
There's no shortage of blue, the sky blue
of the South changes to become a
scepter through which he saw another,
and so on, until the air was invented.
After the days gated
into their chimera by the cash
steering to the dawn the inconsistency
of the eye living beneath,
the rain would come, the bayamo
finding ways to hum
in order to say that I saw, I went.
The world entered summer
as reality was taking place.
Scenes of being to be close,
days for each one to remain:
they saved scraps to the good,
the light on the perpendicular hair.
Such is the divided idea, life:
it ran level without regret,
it was suddenly a thought,
and that scream, whoa, that scream!
Something had been discovered,
some thing or place it's all the same.
And, of course nothing should have
been said to Friday's rain.
The hours went, they did not come,
also the wind, the vision
of silence in something recent.
As for time, he asks, what does one do
to end its existence?
The moon does not explain it, the
cormorant clan would add the
adult ostrich tossing dice.
On its wings, the wave writes
opening the length of the sky.
Syntax would be the arid sea,
the ore so that no one orates
native above the afterworld
but here—where they were—the
truth had the urge to come
on a bike to the ardent atmosphere,
one like that but at a lower price.
It was seen out in the world that time,
labyrinth of time detained
in words like beef jerky,
entrails, simple slippers
how it shivers here and there,
creature, capybara, baby penis,
plus peep, pipe, terms
put so much on trial
they're raised in secret.
Tired, he goes to get them.
Oh the unusual thing in the universe
off the observer's port:
having gone so far,
that as he looked behind
he saw the horizon
a day later.

translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky