Homero Aridjis Poems

El poema gira sobre la cabeza de un hombre
en círculos ya próximos ya alejados

El hombre al descubrirlo trata de poseerlo
...

Un templo que no está en el templo

Un templo que no está en el templo
un templo fuera de su forma
un templo más antiguo que las piedras
un templo que nos habla y no nos nombra
un templo inmóvil que sigue su camino
un templo más rápido que el pensamiento
me refiero al aire
al templo aire



A temple not in the temple

A temple not in the temple
A temple apart from its form
A temple older than the stones
A temple speaking to us but not naming us
A temple without motion that moves on its way
A temple swifter than thought
I refer to air
the temple of air
...

Past noon. Past the cinema
with the tall sorrowful walls
on the point of coming down, I enter the orchard.
Show over, all of them have gone:
day laborers, dogs and doors.
My father is standing in front of a fig tree.
My mother has died. The children, grown old.
He's alone, small threads of air
weave in and out of his tattered clothes.
For fear of getting too close and startling him
with my living presence, I want to go straight by,
the strange one now with white hair whom he asks,
"Who's that there?"
"Father, it's me, your son."
"Does your mother know you're back. Will you stay and eat?"
"Father, for years now your wife has lain at rest
by your side in the town graveyard."
Then, as if he has divined everything,
he calls me by my childhood name
and gives me a fig.
So we met up, the living and the dead.
Then, each went on his way.
...

Goethe said architecture
is frozen music,
but I believe it to be petrified music
and cities, symphonies built out of time,
concerts of visible forgetting.

Of sounds and silences wrought
into iron, wood and air, he said nothing,
perhaps he spoke about the places of verb
where we live, and that way alluded
to us language factories.

Musical streets didn't concern him either,
although man slips via these walkable rivers
into old age, love, the night,
up to the table, into bed,
like a sonata of flesh and bone.
...

It rains in the night
on the old roofs and the wet streets

on the black hills
and on the temples in the dead cities

In the dark I hear the ancestral music of the rain
its ancient footfall its dissolving voice

More rapid than the dreams of men
the rain makes roads through the air

makes trails through the dust
longer than the footstep of men.

Tomorrow we will die
die twice over

Once as individuals
a second time as a species

and between the bolts of lightning and the white seeds
scattered through the shadows

there's time for a complete examination of conscience
time to tell the human story

It rains
It will rain in the night

but on the wet streets and black hills
there will be no one to hear rain fall
...

Un vidrio separaba el cerro Altamirano
de mis manos.

Una puerta dejaba afuera del salón de clases
a la escalera que se precipitaba en el pueblo.

Todos querían entrar a la clase de español:
el gorrión, las piedras, el fresno y el azul del cielo.

Mi lápiz dibujaba a la maestra campesina:
su vestido raío, sus zapatos deslenguados.

Yo aprendía a leer como se aprende a ser:
tú, yo, padre, hermano, la sombra en el pared.
...

De las partes bajas del día
los hombres caen al suelo;
del suelo caen hacia sí mismos,
y de momento en momento
no dejan de venirse abajo.
En la casa, en la calle,
se les puede observar
dando con la cabeza en tierra,
muriendo sin enfermedad
y sin heridas de mano armada.
Mueren de ayer, de soledad,
de poca sombra y de mucha nada.
...