Chronic Telepathy
Don’t tempt me to find
diabolical sense
in our encounter,
what with its jolt, its impact,
the commotion between joints and tendons
we know to be imminent.
A puppet? An empty mask and disguise,
managed from above with strings
and things?
Theirs
with them
yours with you,
your stage entrance and exit,
your health and sickness,
your yes and no,
your inside and out,
your sounds and silence of a marionette.
The curtain’s fall.
What were you muttering in that dream? Offenses, high-pitched utterances; covered in spines or grime, the precious and infectious. So much confusion, so many battles: You advance, foil en guarde, mask affixed, in perfect equilibrium . . . and I permit the attack without the slightest resistance, not even drawing my weapon, though I’ve been lying in wait. I feel the tip pierce my right eye, throwing open the window. What’s that in the distance, what’s that I see—some kind of lightning? A lit passage. And the left eye, the good one, looks at itself in you, observes you in itself. It’s tired. It squints, droops, gives in, allowing the river to carry it away to the lacrimal delta, and as it approaches the antechamber, it can just make out these words: “If art teaches us anything, it’s that the human condition is elusive.” And it makes a single mass of phantasmagoria, delusions, migraines, hunger. A volcano whose face brightens with feeling. Whose mouth begs for alms. It’s lava. Se lava. It washes itself.
May lightning part me
to expose
false intimacy.
Nouns that expand
without parallel actions.
And even so
they reproduce
at will.
What do you see in me? What do you know of me?
Who am I?
My basin emptied,
I’m bursting,
erupting.
And I’m not dying out.
Is anyone there?
Is anyone here?
Don’t leave, don’t leave me. It’s so easy to phrase goodbye as a question. Before you manage to contemplate that famous tunnel with the light reported by those who have been to the edge; before that last breath of consciousness, the sighting of departed loved ones, that supreme happiness that may or may not be beatitude, I’m going to pull you back here. I’m going to answer your “deep,” “inspired,” “fundamental” questions with no return. You ask what I see in you? All the tricks of pity and compassion. You ask how I see you? In the midday light, sun overhead, under your own personal Arc de Triomphe, which you believed was your deserved place of honor in the annals of suffering. What do I know of you? Your genetic code, your ailments and afflictions. Bah! A stumble on the catwalk. Who are you? Fanatical simplicity. And you thought with that you’d paid your dues. Well, let me tell you: There’s not a fire that goes out. You ask if there’s someone on the other side? A resounding no. Who lives? The last glimmer on the tip of the finger that sparked you into existence. There’s someone here.
from Via Corporis
Pura López Colomé
translated from the Spanish by Hillary Gulley
Listen to an excerpt of the original Spanish read by the author:
“Chronic Telepathy” is a selection from Via Corporis, Pura López Colomé’s 2016 collection that grapples with the mind-body connection and how language functions as both a wound and a salve in the healing process. The poems are inspired by abstract oil paintings by Mexican artist Guillermo Arreola, which were themselves inspired by old x-rays thrown out by a hospital in Mexico City.
I was first compelled to translate these poems by what was practically a telepathic experience, in the sense that they spoke to me non-verbally before I could comprehend what was actually written on the page—even though I have no issues reading Spanish. For me, translation and healing are quite similar in that they are both an exercise in recreating an illusory wholeness, all while working through the discomfort of a wound.
Joseph Hutchinson observes in Cerise Press that López Colomé, “[l]ike other hermetic poets, [ . . . ] views language less as personal expression than as a tool for unveiling the invisible. This produces a poetry replete with images that are often abstracted in various ways: unmoored from their apparent occasion or context; blurred, as in a palimpsest, by layers of allusion; made multidimensional through wordplay and gestures, sometimes incomplete, toward symbolism.”
The aforementioned style requires me to also keep a kind of reserve, a discipline, and above all, I must resist any instinct to make radical changes or force the poems in any one direction. So my approach to the text is both restricted and expansive; in other words, it reflects a constant dialogue between the more restrictive, fractured body of the text and the mind’s response to its condition.
I was first compelled to translate these poems by what was practically a telepathic experience, in the sense that they spoke to me non-verbally before I could comprehend what was actually written on the page—even though I have no issues reading Spanish. For me, translation and healing are quite similar in that they are both an exercise in recreating an illusory wholeness, all while working through the discomfort of a wound.
Joseph Hutchinson observes in Cerise Press that López Colomé, “[l]ike other hermetic poets, [ . . . ] views language less as personal expression than as a tool for unveiling the invisible. This produces a poetry replete with images that are often abstracted in various ways: unmoored from their apparent occasion or context; blurred, as in a palimpsest, by layers of allusion; made multidimensional through wordplay and gestures, sometimes incomplete, toward symbolism.”
The aforementioned style requires me to also keep a kind of reserve, a discipline, and above all, I must resist any instinct to make radical changes or force the poems in any one direction. So my approach to the text is both restricted and expansive; in other words, it reflects a constant dialogue between the more restrictive, fractured body of the text and the mind’s response to its condition.
Pura López Colomé was born in Mexico City. A poet, literary critic, and translator, she spent part of her childhood in Mérida, Yucatan, and attended high school in the United States. She studied literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, publishing a regular column for the newspaper Unomásuno. English translations of her work include Watchword (Graywolf, 2012), translated by Forrest Gander; Aurora (Shearsman Books, 2007), translated by Jason Stumpf; and No Shelter: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), translated by Forrest Gander. López Colomé has translated works by Samuel Beckett, H.D., Seamus Heaney, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and others into Spanish. In 2008 she received Mexico’s Xavier Villaurrutia Award, Mexico’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize. She lives in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
Hillary Gulley is a multidisciplinary artist whose practices include both writing and translation. Her literary work has appeared, most notably, in Smithsonian Journeys, The Washington Post, Words Without Borders, and Brick, A Literary Journal. She has translated numerous book-length commercial and literary novels from Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, while benefiting from the financial support of PEN America, the Vermont Studio Center, the Mystery Writers of America, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
