Repetition Nineteen. Mónica de la Torre
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Название: Repetition Nineteen
Автор: Mónica de la Torre
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Зарубежные стихи
isbn: 9781643620633
isbn:
Two
This binary roadblock here
demands that you back off
to keep on contemplating it.
It fancies itself a zebra
standing on diamond-patterned stilts
for camouflage’s sake
and fastens itself to an equally
ornamented attachment
as if to hide from its handlers.
Forget it, it’s not interested
in establishing any rapport with you.
Blame it on instinct; it knows
how coveted equids are in the North
American private sector.
Three
Here’s your morality tale,
an optical conundrum/psychoactive puzzle:
the dominant lines lock,
while the areas they delimit contain
other lines within, of the faint,
disjointed variety.
Like interconnected
people and the basic story lines they each cling to
to remind themselves of themselves.
Yes, this is redundant.
In this picture, both
types of lines compete
for your attention, so that the eyes’
only resting spot
is a central area where color
has enough room to settle.
That old positing of linear
thought patterns versus the dispersal
of feelings and their counter-
tendency to ground.
In the source language disparate,
pronounced dis-pah-rah-teh, is nonsense.
Place an accent on the wrong
syllable and it becomes “shoot yourself.”
Let’s not overthink this.
Divagar
“There’s a lot of waiting in the drama of experience.”
Lyn Hejinian, Oxota
No signal from the interface except for a frozen half-bitten fruit.
Other than that, no logos. An hour is spent explaining
to the group what I’ve forgotten, to do with the mistranslation
of a verb that means drifting but can imply deviance.
The next hour goes by trying to remember, in the back of my mind,
the name of the artist who makes paintings on inkjets.
Why I’d think of him escapes me. Now my gaze circles the yoga bun
of the tall woman in front of me. I didn’t pay $20 to contemplate
the back of her head. It’s killing me. The pillars and plaster
saints with their tonsures floating amid electronic sound waves.
At such volume they could crumble. The virgin safe in a dimly lit
niche as the tapping on my skull and the clamor of bones or killer
bees assaults the repurposed church. This is what I sought, while
in another recess I keep hearing Violeta’s “ Volver a los diecisiete”
and seventeen-year-olds marching against the nonsense of arming
teachers. If I were an instrument. A bassoon. In the source language
we don’t say “spread the word.” Pasa la voz is our idiom, easily
mistaken for a fleeting voice. From the back row all I see is fingers
gliding in sync with her vocalizations. How fitting a last name
like halo. Lucky for us here time is measure and inexplicable
substance. That’s when I decide to stop fighting the city. Use it in my
favor. Speak to strangers. Demolish the construct in the performance.
La sottise
It dawned on me, the other day, at the launch
of a former colleague’s book, that if I ever
was a funny poet, I no longer was one.
I’d picked something amusing to read since
the party would be at a bar, and people wouldn’t
want to stay still and listen to us drone on
but instead would be there to drink and celebrate
their friend’s accomplishment, no matter what
they actually thought of his poems; they
were good poems, don’t get me wrong. Alright,
they were somewhat sincere, a bit saccharine,
but that’s beside the point, and, anyway, who cares.
During my reading no one chuckled loud enough
to let me know that my humor had landed.
Granted, it was subtle. My poem had to do
with the people you encounter in hotels when,
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