The clouds will remain clean

Not for future generations
but around my body
i have built, without being a glazier,
a transparent cubicle.
My associative chains,
which I have, draw
a deity of pain inside.
Slow inaudible blahblahblah
carved in bone that keeps me
company and then calls
the herd of humans.
The reporters can come,
the visual artists can come,
their egos in plastic bags.
With the double sale that an image
of devastation be at one time
an ephemeral sculpture.
I am inside, a plane,
in other words outside of what I
could represent as myself, as if
I carried an earring
without an ear. I have a stanza,
I have a comb; what I don’t see,
pressed against the glass, is a hairdo
that is also a man,
possesses a song.

By Rafael Espinosa
translated, from the Spanish, by Jose Antonio Villarán

 
Jose Antonio Villarán received his BA in Writing from SFSU in 2005. He Published “la distancia es siempre la misma” in 2006, and “el cerrajero” in 2012. He is the Creator of the AMLT project. He’s currently an MFA candidate in Writing at UCSD.

Rafael Espinosa is one of Peru’s most important contemporary poets. Among his recent work we find “El Anticiclón del Pacífico Sur” (2007) and “Amados transformadores de corriente” (2010). The poems published in this issue of Alchemy belong to “Hombres Rana,” published in December 2012.