Isla Negra Read online

night

  wore away his body. Now he remains.

  And a sea plant kisses his wound.

  The Shipwrecked

  Shipwrecks of stone sang on the coast

  and the tower they sang was radiant salt

  raising itself drop by drop until it turned into water,

  bubble by bubble climbing to the air.

  The shipwrecked that oblivion turned to stone

  (not an oblivion but all the oblivion),

  those that hoped, partly submerged, for

  earthly help, voices, shoulders, wine, aspirin,

  and only received infernal crabs,

  they became the stiff dead ones with granite eyes

  and here their statues were scattered,

  their formless, round, solitary statues.

  Yet they learned to sing. Slowly

  the voice of all the shipwrecked rose.

  It was a song of salt like a wave,

  it was a lighthouse of invisible stones:

  parallel stones

  looking toward the lightning bolts of oceania

  toward the bristling sea,

  toward the infinite without boats or countries.

  A sun fell, lifting

  the green sword of its last light,

  another sun fell beneath

  from cloud to cloud toward winter,

  still another sun

  crossed the waves,

  savage plumes

  that lifted anger and seafoam

  over the irritated

  walls of turquoise

  and there in the huge mass:

  parallel sisters,

  immobile,

  detained

  by the rest of the cold,

  clustered within its force

  like lionesses transformed into rock,

  like prows that go on without ocean

  in the direction of the time,

  the crystalline eternity of the journey.

  Solitudes

  Among the stones of the coast, walking,

  by the shore of Chile,

  farther off

  sea and sea, moon and sea grass,

  the lonely expanse of the planet.

  The coast broken

  by thunder,

  consumed

  by the teeth of every dawn,

  worn by great stirrings

  of weather and waves:

  slow birds circle

  with iron-colored feathers

  and they know the world ends here.

  No one said why,

  no one exists,

  it isn’t written, there are no numbers or letters,

  no one trampled the sand, dark

  as pollen of lead.

  here desolate flowers were born,

  plants that expressed themselves with thorns

  and sudden blossoms

  of furious petals.

  No one said there wasn’t any territory,

  that here emptiness begins,

  the ancient emptiness that guides

  with catastrophe, darkness

  and shadow, darkness, shadows:

  so it is the harsh coast, that road

  of south and north and west, and solitude.

  Beautiful virtue of that struggle

  water and seafoam erect

  on this long border:

  a structure like a flower-wave

  repeating its castle-like form,

  its tower that decays and crumbles

  only to swell beating anew

  pretending

  to populate the darkness with its beauty,

  fill the abyss with light.

  Walking

  from the final antarctic

  by stone and sea, hardly

  saying a word,

  only the eyes speak and rest.

  Innumerable solitude swept

  by wind and salt, by cold,

  by chains,

  by moon and seaquake:

  I must recall the toothless star

  that here collapsed,

  to gather the fragments

  of stone, to hear

  no one and speak with no one,

  to be and not be a solitary motion:

  I am the sentinel

  of a barracks without soldiers,

  of a great solitude filled with stones.

  The Stones of Chile

  Mad stones of Chile, pouring

  from mountain ranges,

  full of rocks

  black, blind, opaque,

  that joined

  roads to the earth,

  that placed time and stone

  by the day’s journey,

  white rocks

  that interrupt the rivers

  and are kissed

  smooth

  by a seismic

  ribbon of seafoam,

  granite

  of the glimmering

  high seas

  beneath

  the snow

  like a monastery,

  backbone

  of the

  strongest

  country

  or unmovable

  ship,

  prow

  of the terrible earth,

  stone, infinitely pure stone,

  sealed

  like

  a cosmic dove,

  stiff from sun, from wind, from energy,

  from mineral dream, from dark time,

  crazy stones,

  stars

  and pavilion

  slept,

  rolling peaks, cliffs:

  knew the stillness

  around

  your lasting silence,

  beneath the Antarctic

  mantle of Chile,

  beneath

  your iron clarity.

  House

  Perhaps this is the house I lived in

  when neither I nor earth existed,

  when all was moon or stone or darkness,

  when still light was unborn.

  Perhaps then this stone was

  my house, my windows or my eyes.

  This rose of granite reminds me

  of something that dwelled in me or I in it,

  a cave, or cosmic head of dreams,

  cup or castle, ship or birth.

  I touch the stubborn spirit of rock,

  its rampart pounds in the brine,

  and my flaws remain here,

  wrinkled essence that rose

  from the depths to my soul,

  and stone I was, stone I will be. Because of this

  I touch this stone, and for me it hasn’t died:

  it’s what I was, what I will be, resting

  from a struggle long as time.

  The Blind Statue

  It’s been thousands and thousands of

  years of stone.

  I was a stonecutter

  and this is what I did

  striking

  without hands

  or hammer,

  piercing

  without chisel,

  staring into the sun without eyes,

  without being,

  without existence but in the wind,

  with only a wave for my thought,

  without tools other

  than time,

  the time,

  the passing time.

  I sculpted the statue blind

  so that she wouldn’t see,

  that there

  in the desolate

  sand

  she would keep her mass

  like my monument:

  the blind

  statue

  which the first man

  that departed from stone,

  the son of power,

  the first

  that dug, touched and imposed on

  its lost creation,

  searching for fire.

  And I was born, naked

  and blue, a stonecutter,

  lengthwise from shores in darkness<
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  from rivers still unknown

  in caves lashed by the tails

  of somber lizards,

  and it was hard to encounter myself,

  to become hands,

  eyes, fingers, seeking

  my own blood,

  and then my joy

  became a statue:

  my own form that I had copied

  striking across the centuries in stone.

  Ox

  Creature of seafoam

  traveling

  by night, day,

  sand.

  Animal

  of autumn

  walking

  toward the ancient

  scent of moss,

  sweet ox

  in whose beard

  flowered rocks

  of the subsoil,

  and where the earthquake armed itself

  with thunder and footsteps,

  ruminating the darkness,

  lost

  between lighting flashes

  while seafoam lives,

  while the day

  extracts

  the hours from its tower

  and the night collapses,

  over time

  her dark cold sack,

  trembling.

  The Harp

  Only the music came. There was no feather, hair,

  milk, smoke or names. Neither night nor day.

  Alone between the planets born from the eclipse

  music trembled like cloth.

  Suddenly fire and cold coagulated in a drop

  and the universe molded its extensive display,

  lava, bristling ashes, slippery dawn,

  everything was transformed from hardness to hardness,

  and under the dampness newly celestial,

  established the diamond with its frozen symmetry.

  Then the primal sound,

  the solitary music of the world

  congealed and fell changing into a star,

  a harp, a zither, silence, stone.

  Along the Chilean coast, with cold and winter,

  when rain falls washing the weeks.

  Listen: solitude becomes music once more,

  and it seems its appearance is that of air, of rain,

  that time, something with wave and wings, passes by,

  grows. And the harp awakes from oblivion.

  Theater of the Gods

  It is like this on the coast.

  Suddenly, contorted,

  harsh, piled up,

  static,

  collapsing,

  either tenacious theaters,

  or ships and corridors

  or rolling

  severed limbs:

  it is like this on the coast,

  the rocky lunar slope,

  the grapes of granite.

  Orange stains

  of oxide, green seams,

  above the chalky peace,

  that the seafoam strikes with its keys

  or dawn with its rose

  these stones are like this:

  no one knows

  if they came from the sea or will return to the sea,

  something

  astonished them

  while they lived,

  and they faltered in the stillness

  and constructed a dead city.

  A city without cries,

  without kitchens,

  a solemn ring

  of purity,

  tumbling pure shapes

  in a confusion without resurrection,

  in a crowd that lost its vision,

  in a grey monastery condemned

  to the naked truth of its gods.

  The Lion

  A great lion arrived from afar:

  it was huge as silence,

  it was thirsty, seeking blood,

  and behind his investiture,

  he had fire like a house,

  it burned like a mountain of Osorno.

  It found only solitude.

  It roared of shyness and hunger:

  it could eat only air,

  seafoam unpunished by the coast,

  frozen sea lettuce,

  breeze the color of birds,

  unappealing nourishment.

  Melancholy lion from another planet

  cast up by the high tide

  to the small rocky islands of Isla Negra,

  the salty archipelago,

  with no more than an empty snout,

  idle claws

  and a tail of ragged feathers.

  It felt all the ridicule

  of its warlike appearance

  and with the passing years

  it wrinkled in shame.

  Its fear then brought on

  the worst arrogance

  and it went on growing old like one

  of the lions in the plaza,

  it transformed into an ornament

  for a stone staircase or garden,

  until it buried its sad forehead,

  fixed its eyes on the rain,

  and remained quiet hoping for

  the grey justice of stone,

  its geologic hour.

  I Will Return

  Some other time, man or woman, traveler,

  later, when I am not alive,

  look here, look for me

  between stone and ocean,

  in the light storming

  through the foam.

  Look here, look for me,

  for here I will return, without saying a thing,

  without voice, without mouth, pure,

  here I will return to be the churning

  of the water, of

  its unbroken heart,

  here, I will be discovered and lost:

  here, I will, perhaps, be stone and silence.

  The Great Stone Table

  We arrive at the great stone table

  the children of Lota, Quepe,

  Quitratue and Metrenco.

  Of Ranquilco, Selva Oscura,

  Yumbel, Yungay and Osorno.

  We sit by the table,

  the cold table of the world

  and no one has brought us anything.

  Everything was consumed,

  they had eaten all of it.

  One plate alone remains,

  waiting on the immense hard table

  of the world and the void.

  Still a child waits

  who is the truth of every dream,

  who is the hope of our earth.

  Where the Thirsty Fell

  Hips of stone in the desert.

  Here the walker fell

  on death.

  Here ended the journey

  and the traveler.

  Everything was sun, everything was thirst and sand.

  He couldn’t stand it and became silent.

  Then came the next one

  and he greeted

  the fallen one

  with a stone,

  with a thirsty stone from the road.

  Oh heart of scattered dust,

  transformed into desert dust,

  traveler and companion heart,

  perhaps, of nitrate mines and works,

  perhaps of the bitter mining,

  you left and took to the road in the sand,

  by the desert salt, with the sand.

  Now a stone and another

  erected here

  a monument to the tired hero,

  who couldn’t stand it and abandoned his two feet,

  then his legs, then his gaze,

  life on the road of sand.

  Now a stone came,

  a harsh memory flew,

  a smooth stone arrived,

  and the tomb of the man in the desert

  is a fist of solidarity in stone.

  The Portrait in the Rock

  Yes, I knew him, I lived years

  with him, with his substance of gold and stone.

  He was a man who was worn down.

 
In Paraguay he left his father and mother,

  his sons, his nephews,

  his latest in-laws,

  his gate, his hens

  and some half-opened books.

  They called him to the door.

  When he opened it, the police took him

  and they beat him so much

  that he spat blood in France, in Denmark,

  in Spain, in Italy, traveling,

  and so he died and I stopped seeing his face,

  stopped hearing his profound silence.

  Then once, on a stormy night,

  with snow weaving

  a pure coat on the mountains,

  a horse, there, in the distance,

  I looked and there was my friend:

  his face was formed in stone,

  his profile defied the wild weather,

  in his nose the wind was muffling

  the howls of the persecuted.

  There the man driven from his land returned:

  here in his country, he lives, transformed into stone.

  The Ship

  We walked and climbed: the world

  was a parched noon,

  the air didn’t tremble, the leaves didn’t exist,

  the water was far away.

  The boat or prow then

  rose from the deserts

  and sailed toward the sky:

  a point of stone guided

  toward the unbearable infinity,

  a closed palace

  for the lost gods.

  And there was the prow, the arrow, the ship

  or dreadful tower,

  and for the toiling,

  the thirsty, the dusty,

  the sweating race

  of man that climbed

  the difficult hills,

  neither water nor bread nor pasture,

  only a large rock that rose,

  only a stubborn boat of stone and music.

  For how long? I cried out, we shouted.

  Finally mother earth killed us

  with its harsh cactus,

  with its ironous maternity,

  with all this desert,

  sweat, wind and sand,

  and when we finally arrived

  to rest, wrapped in void,

  a boat of stone

  still wanted to ship us

  toward where, without wings,

  we couldn’t fly

  without dying.

  This we endured when we were tired

  and the mountain range was hard,

  heavy as a chain.

  Only then, my journey ended, here:

  beyond, where death began.

  The Rugged Ship

  Boat of thorns

  pierced

  like the breast of a man

  in a voyage of pain,

  banner

  that pierced

  time

  with its struggle

  and later

  waving in and out, left in the cracks

  the chalky winter,

  snow,