Ricardo Stern

Ricardo Stern Poems

The Best Poem Of Ricardo Stern

Holy Friday

Waiting for something
like a life, the life, mi life, anything
resembling something more than only the wait.
Are heroes patient or impatient?
They are just, but tragedy awaits them.
I feel like a testy kid
when I go out to the backyard of my own past;
the leaves of its young oak have burgeoned in the last days.
And I feel inexact, openly inexact;
blurry, anciently blurry.
And I don´t ignore that Death leaves her secret,
goes back from her almost craved-for old hypocrisy,
without saying a word she spies me, touches the palisade, sighs,
looks through the shutters when I go up to the room and look through the shutters.
She´s my brain and my sight.
I don´t know of me but that I´m a Death,
and yet in my organs the Paradise blooms.
Today is Holy Friday.

I´m living in a little house among thousands.
From the air they all look the same.
We, human beings, live in little houses or bedsitting rooms
and nobody knows us. Nothing new.
We live in a skull,
and not even ourselves know that skull,
but it is vaster than the universe,
and deeper than the sea at night.
Blacker than black tobacco,
that skull dreams of me, or in it a philosophical smoke dreams of me,
and becomes me, like the smoke of my pipe
seems to know everything and to be I myself.
I sit at midnight in the old armchair,
to smoke and see the slow smoke
against the old orange gaslight
that gets, too, into other houses, other solitudes and almost other times.
I think, then, that I like art with people inside.
A perfect painting has persons there, from far, from near,
little persons; brushstrokes (trace that also a person made the painting) should be noticeable,
and the milieu should be interesting and full of fantasy.
Some abandoned ruins
are suddenly more beautiful when the wanderer stops to watch them
with awe, and it´s almost the wanderer´s awe
what attracts us more in the painting that the ruins themselves.
Or can it be conceived a sculpture that is not a human being?
A novel without persons? Isn´t it a true malady
that hollow and calculated music, without persons?

I expected much, who knows from whom, who knows from where,
and in how many mirrors I looked myself?
I don´t know, but the mirror is the other face of my face,
the other theater of my lonely memory.
Tenant of my skull, who made your figure blurry?
It´s been so much since I can´t stand the silence!


*

Today, I haven´t gone out of the house, again.
I like the sun for moments, to see it in the walls and in the green leaves,
but in this long and inhuman dream,
there´s no safer place than a house with shutters.
My heart is today a sad Israel
besieged by a thousand Babylons,
and my mind, almost without any Eternal, doesn´t know where to find the liberty.

The voices of water that come out of the tap
(voices like mine, usually) ,
hot, vaporous voices, and voices of bubbles playacting to last,
fill my day, and this aloof sentiment
of things, only grows like the age of the Earth.
I want to speak with others of my mistakes,
tell somebody how I feel today.
Mistakes are like babbling Hydras,
like mythical, dangerous, grumbling Medusas,
or corpses stacked up at the door of my house.
Sometimes they are thunderous projectiles from wars of other times,
or mysterious mines whose treasuries are long ago ended
and where only gloom remains.
I took the potions and poisons that deceive the most,
I loved the figures that best corrode,
and today I have no strength to remove those corpses from the door
and carry them for burial. Maybe it is late,
and the horror of finding in each one of them
my own features, can be terminal.


*

I was in the backyard today for a couple of hours,
I got excited with the idea of removing the pumpkins and peppers
to put instead plenty of eye-catching flowers.
Those flowers that are like history, like thought.
They are the art of the land and of the sun, solar philosophy,
dream of the farm work and the times.
But I lit the pipe and just stayed watching the smoke,
that smoke which is my thought, mi double.
I was neither the genius of gardening
that I dreamt of, perhaps, in my revolutionary hours of afternoon
reading, when I got home from work.
Those books of plants and paths, fountains, sunny palaces,
full of classic wisdom and beauty,
in which I learned to design parterres and terraces,
to measure the sun´s position and to calculate the shadows
of trees, statuary, pergolas and trellises,
dreaming with perfection in drawing,
are now well kept in boxes, for in boxes
end up frequently the dreams
(and not only the bodies) , of pale, unhealthy men,
seriously plague-ridden with enthusiasm.


*

More skeptic I became
as more in the truth I believed.
And I have a drop of a votary,
because I´m shipwrecking.
When I chose the less traveled of roads,
when I embarked on the abandoned ship, and without navigation
charts, what was I thinking?
O, the sea, the sea inside my skull,
so dark and neverending!
I can try to negotiate with God
that something remain of me, that some sense
might really have this wreckage and frustration,
that this board don´t sink, that my daughter
may survive and remember me, one day, and forget
that I was a madman, and may she forgive
that I wasn´t the genius of the century neither in gardening, nor in poetry,
nor simply a good father… It´s not too much to ask all this
in a negotiation. But I don´t know what to offer in exchange,
maybe God doesn´t need my wet garments.


*

I went up to the room and it was dark already.
Before closing the shutters, I looked at the street for a moment.
A simple, empty suburban street,
from any place, which is this, for any place is I,
and any place seems to be –illusion of illusions-
in my hermetic conscience,
and at the same time far from it.
Sick like and old arborvitae, mi jumbled conscience;
like a cloud loaded with windstorms, it remembers and desires.
Sick of inclemencies, of frights, of losses.
Sick like a pustule of thoughts,
a scab attached to the sore brain,
but with hope of living one day.


*

O, window, eye of the houses!
You protect from the seasons and the portion of the world
where it´s difficult to live, at the time you let us see it,
specked with dust or caught among the cracks of the shutters,
already withdrawn from the scent of the flowers,
without the desolating humidity of the Gulf´s summers,
without the vulgar, silly story of what can be simply labeled as “the life”.
And nevertheless, I shall open you and poke out my face to the wind,
waiting for something.

And so, all scabby and sick of blame,
I spend the time making personifications of solitary, speaking to the window,
eating chocolate and nuts, those old cures and illusions.
But I don´t detest my life, I can´t detest my life,
and I don´t want to leave life losing.
For now, with knowing better what is reality, and enjoying
the sunlight in old buildings or upon the water of a millpond,
the air that confers some actuality to our presence in an open field,
and some other things, I´m contented. What is air,
what is reality? Where is it encrypted?
Does mental illness prove that it is in our neuronal tissues only?
Aren´t the magnolia and the holly real?
No, my life hasn´t been stolen. I have the spring,
I have this Easter, flowery and full of recent fruits,
that is coming in two days. The last? The only?
I have the bleeding God, like a red, balsamic plum tree,
who still enters, riding a donkey,
my old Jerusalem, on certain Palm Sundays.

O, the worst enemy of man is pessimism!
And there is nothing, in order to make us remember it, as a good tobacco from the Bailiwick of Jersey,
smoked in the fresh spring mornings,
in the backyard of this American little house, or strolling by the neighborhood.
What does it matter the unreasonable and scandalous vastness of the Cosmos?
The magnolia and the holly are real.
It´s real the smoke of my pipe to the howling wind.
And all this is a great solace.

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