from YOUTH
The way the snow falls
and covers the plain
that’s how I grew up
at the hearts of your eyes.
***
You don’t tell me about what happened.
You sustain your gaze
across glass and fold
inward without losing sight of me.
You don’t tell me about what happened
or mention the loss.
I am your youth.
I am your youth. I look at the wire that
stretches
from window to window
where
yellow birds
rest
in the afternoon.
***
This is my legacy.
persecution of ghosts. Corridors of
dust and ants.
***
This is my legacy.
tightness of the lower jaw clenched against
smoke and still asking who.
I say
I’ll sell myself for you and you won’t even
realize it. Between the two of us the ghosts
won’t go hungry.
There was no celebration or flame
to illuminate your pretty red mind.
You were naked too when you arrived.
***
II.
I trace lines across the tapestry of nothing
of things. In the absence of my lines
a soldier’s silhouette appears and a date that
the nothingness of things goes on erasing.
***
The storm lags. Ozone. Lack.
Bodies without light. Streets that
don’t point north.
Our feet are not made-to-measure.
If the sky were vast we would fill it. Dazed still. To say
come along
before starting.
To draw
the curtain of rain. To descend.
***
from LARVA
It swells in me in its exact
disorder from branch to
bone from
hollow to
overflowing.
like a parasite memory takes root.
***
Delicate rope rocked by the wind.
Drawbridge between the halves of my name.
*****
Pilar Fraile Amador is one of the most innovative of the generation of Spanish poets who have come of age post-Franco. Born in Salamanca in 1975, she earned her PhD in Philosophy from University of Oviedo and currently teaches at Enseñanza Secundaria. In 2005, Fraile Amador was awarded the Poetry Prize from the University of Zaragoza. Her publications include El límite de la ceniza (Prensas universitarias de Zaragoza), Larva (Editorial Amphibia) and La pecera subterránea (Ediciones Amargord), among others. Her work has also been featured in the homage for José Ángel Valente, Pajaros Raíces (Abada Editores), and in the anthology La república de la imaginación (Legados Ediciones), as well as in translator and poet Forrest Gander’s most recent book of translation, Panic Cure: Poems from Spain for the 21st Century.
Lizzie Davis is a writer, translator, and musician living in Providence, Rhode Island. Her translations have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail,Circumference, and Aldus, a Journal of Translation, among others. This year, two of her chapbooks of translation, Book of Birds with the Faces of Women and Circular, are forthcoming from the multilingual Spanish press Skat.