Prose Poem in Collage:
the smell with sticky beard, sleep then VIVAMUS MEA LESBIA RUMORERSQUE dormienda est. The trees were not naturally aligned my sole wealth, it always rises, I can’t believe the light still touches us on earth, far so it you. Today they try, they think, or they know—they see all of me. the account of great uncle but—Ava, there’s a lot of acorns everywhere. twigs to record. Counting all of them, the wizard VIVAMUS MEA AMICA. to write about his mother only through to come and burn You’ll miss the ones by the tree. You’re only grasping fallen acorns fallen from the beaks far and all the loose-tobacco is smoked. cracked brick pavements on which once wandered myriads: Finding Father remembered and presented is far away, in the West there is darkness whence the sun always rises. I will not count myself, nor myself Blue camels purchased when the rolling papers are, finished from any thin lip, the spittle of the bark means, Drink of me & in his white Mercedes is feared, if only slightly feared. Curling chi in a row. All one’s memories are set up to be thrown He knows he can lick his spell on the numbered There are too many great uncle’s name whose sister cried to death in labor and brought him up A list of twigs: Id cum alis is not a pet to trap no matter. and make a limping assassin pressed on each curl a mango shell, missed In ante-empire all my books,
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|||||||||||||||||| squirms laughing. amongst their counting for fear I became a pars and subdued to nothing. Mortiī ignoremus. Nox perpetua una a finger to scribe out—not; this manner is, here only. I cut open the branch and fell till morning through a sap calling with by name its name was its from lovers, keepsake images of the two of in cupboards, with books, notes you had vinyls you could hide I stopped here. great Mind’s schemes. ISearching up and through the as we please in the
A Quick Word on Bolaño:
My gift to you will be an abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you'll perceive it
only after many years have passed
and you are far from Mexico and me.
“I believe Bolaño went to Chile, was a fighter in the Chilean Communist revolution, was captured by Pinochet’s thugs, was imprisoned, and rose on the third day with the help of a friend.” But if our creed is dead, our author still lives. Reading Bolaño, from his prose to poesy, always went like this: counting the pages you had left and thinking, It really is all a shame. I felt the same reading Brodsky’s Watermark; from the first page you come to believe that the Venetian sea has beguiled Brodsky only to pen its own self-portrait through his writing. This connection between Brodsky and Bolaño cannot be anything close to arbitrary, perhaps because of their shared exile status, but apart from it, perhaps it is arbitrary. Sometimes you read the two and think that there never was a homeland, or the homeland can never again be retrieved. The instability of origin must have prompted both to myth, Brodsky frequently employing the classics, albeit, in part, as a homage to Mandelstam, and Bolaño urging his son to “Read the old poets”. Amongst his old poets was Borges, though the former seemed to have mainly regarded Borges as a short-story writer. Nevertheless, it was through the dictum that I myself discovered the Great Argentine. I strive to consider and refer to both Latin American writers as poets to honor their requests. The universe in its sardonic humor acknowledged such a request from either and deemed them giants of fiction instead. No doubt Borges was aware of this fate, writing in “A Minor Poet”, “The goal is oblivion./I have arrived early.” They are poets to me, though Borges’ poetry may rightfully earn its oblivion, while Bolaño’s sustains itself in an aligned row with his fiction. Yet Bolaño could have never written “Death and the Compass”, and Borges could have never written “Clara”. But what Borgesian work Bolaño could imitate was quickly grounded in a material reality. Bolaño really is a Marxist writer. By Night in Chile’s brilliance is in the unfolding disillusionment of a Jesuit priest, his tuning fork against his religion, his youth, and his Chile, who in one instance watches other priests conjuring up ways to deal with pigeons shitting on their cathedrals, and simply watches, and records the preservation attempts. Unlike the Christian brothers, Bolaño allows it all to fall. Where Borges might have flirted with exposing the linty in-between-the-toes of literature, Bolaño willingly plucked them up, swirled around his mouth, and out onto the page, they took a moment to feel the coolness of the lines before they began to unravel and spread his saliva. Life might have wanted an arbitrary revenge and cursed Bolaño with a bad liver. My hero died at fifty, second-in-line for a transplant. I don’t know if I can forgive the universe’s dry humor and resentment. We only feel the abyss after many years, after we have left our homeland, when we float in a river of flags. It is a gift only after many years, when we reflect on the chances we had to have known.
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