City Poem

I walk a city
Where my steps leave no trace,
A city whose nights are birds
Picking on the breadcrumbs of memory.

I walk by trees anointed
With smells heirs of amoniac and rain,
By obese nurses in pastel gowns
Vomited by glass doors of emergency rooms,
By produce stands
Suspended as minuscule tropical jungles
Above the asphalt,
By old widows
Who have replaced their dead soul-mates
With little curly-haired dogs,
By iron trees
With fruits of traffic lights,
By bums
With eyes withdrawn by meth and ancient sorrow,
By obsessive doves
As scavengers of any meager charity.

But my legs fall out of tune
And I stop and lean beneath
A hedge of tile
That lies as the toenail of a skyscraper,
But I don’t attempt to scrape the sky anymore,
For my reach has found
The same destiny as the Tower of Babel.
And the sun comes out
From behind a cloud
Shaped as a broken dragon
And I continue to chase my shadow
In a city
Where my steps
Leave no trace.

Enrique Pallares H.

NYC 2010

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before...

We sat facing each other, like lotuses, bare mind and bare feet. Every floating particle of dust gleamed its meager contour against the frugal sun, cocooning us in evident, candid air. Your mouth spoke silent words and grinned. Your eyes shone, quivered and shrank at their ends. You broke your bread and gave me the bigger half. A bee then ceased her quick flight on a flower-top and you took it by the wings with your swift and gentle hands. You put her beating body (too heavy for flight) against the sunlight, examined it with fisting eyes and glanced at me one more time. Your hand like a dove carried the bee to meet with your piece of bread. The bee stretched its convex black and yellow abdomen, reached (I don’t know if in fury, joy or resignation) and stung the bread, leaving her stinger buried in the dough and ripping her entrails with its hook. There was something very particular about this sacrifice, for instead of poison, it coated the bread with golden honey. You set the bee free and it flew to die alone, unseen. Immediately another bee hesitated on a white chrysanthemum, you took it by its wings and repeated the ritual with my bread. That bee too flew away to die in some distant hideout. We sat facing each other, holding our food with both hands, our eyes drifting from dilated pupil to dilated pupil, our golden bread anointed with the fresh sacrifice of the bees and their minuscule thorns still stabbing the dough as silver slivers. With your grace and your fingers, more immaculate and clever than those who didn’t know the spindle, you gently picked out both stingers. Your mouth with lips like two full slices of pomegranate opened and your teeth dug deep into the bread, and me, with my lips sliced by the crevices of memory followed your example. It was then, a second before the void conquered our bucolic empire that I closed my eyes at the image of your kind smile and your vulnerable glance, and all the tender delight of honey filled my mouth, one second before I awoke to the immeasurable weight of an empty bed and the sweetest aftertaste of the most tangible of premonitions.

Granada, March 23, 2010

On Beauty (beyond man´s finger)

And the entire world vibrates. The world behind the walls shakes emulating the heart of man (or the other way around). I cannot see or touch the fins of glory, yet glory shines its iridescence on the eyes of the young: Here is New York! Here is New York! The poet reaches for the unreachable sky and the idle wrestles a defeated romance in the lower shadows. And although the poet cannot say that a Technicolor leaf quivers its way down from the tree to the vibrations that flutter in the throat of the nightingale; and although they don’t let the muses in at the door and beauty is slapped around and whored; and although Christ is not born again for fear of a more brutal sentence; the world vibrates, indifferent to man.

Window like a Funnel on a Little House on the Hill

Barbados, February 2009

My window leads to one thousand flickering lights who vacillate like fireflies on the verge of summer. The music comes up from beach bars through the dark prairies full of sleeping monkeys and gloomy streets with weak light posts, to my retreat. The longing for the city whispers again to my solitude. The longing for my previous life comes galloping like a stampede through the glassless windows, invisibly breaching the mosquito nets and stabbing my pupils with one hundred neon daggers of excess. I sit on top of the island like a ghostly control tower; and the Caribbean charges against the hotels and the rocks as young girls bounce in the distance from white rum, to rum rum, to laughter, to dance, to explosion. From my hermitage, I cynically grin at my "reputation as a ladies man." Then I take a look at my naked body in the mirror; at that I grin again. I wonder over and over what do all those insignificant windows hide in them; and the skin of some petty intimacy again palpitates.

Many things have been mine. I have tried to posses experiences like precious stones, and all that is really left is a perception, certainly affected by all those nights, dives and scents, but no touch from them I have tonight. It is three twenty two in the morning and a very eloquent cello sings lazily in the arms of some dead French woman. I am trapped between the crepuscular silence and a broken bone. I took of my shoes and ran away, through hallways of dust, through massive stands of dour judgments, through unconsciousness, through bitter words of wisdom, and through a long gravel road. I ran away to beauty. Then in beauty I found all the same deception condensed into ancient maroon stalactites, with serpentines of black humor surrounding some of them. I found, in beauty, very much and very little. But I do feel restless, for I forget these truths at times. I hesitate. At this time of night, when the brutal lawn mower sleeps like a child, it all seems clear. This cosmic silence is sung by jazz crickets, whose scale sounds so infinite now for my meager human ears. And all the spiders respect my solitude like no brilliant man ever has before. And all concepts are entwined in mere acceptance. As the day comes though, and an insolent sun comes barking at the choir of creatures of the night, I again hesitate.