ROBERT LOWELL, EZEIZA AIRPORT, 1962
Carlos Barbarito
trans. Brian Cole
°***°
How to struggle against madness,
blue pain that is nowhere and everywhere?
Now you can scarcely see the back of the world,
a dry number , the bush before the flames:
it cannot rise up from the darkness,
undo the knot, relieve the hunger:
there is a needle that perforates the waves one by one,
a brackish, thick water
that comes to the mouth after an infinity of pipes,
an ancient stench that will not fade.
In the word, the stitch.
In reason, bodies that do not stick to their shadows,
echoes that resound without any obvious origin,
a memory of childhood, buried, transformed into frost.
The dream is followed by an obsession.
The obsession comes before death, at a price and
unaesthetic .
And death is late, it comes on the back of a three-legged
dog.
"I want to start it all again with you -"
he says.
That is said to an unknown woman,
as if if would be said in desperation
to a wheel that will not stop turning,
to a gospel under a rock,
to a fish involved in the past and bitter.
And pity blows without wind, apocryphal.
...
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