Two Poems

Abstract

top photo : phil grondin 32 worldliteraturetoday.org Two Poems Fabio Morábito Fabio Morábito was born in 1955 in Egypt to Italian parents and has lived in Mexico City for over forty years. His first book, Lotes baldíos (1985), won the Carlos Pellicer Prize and his second, De lunes todo el año (1992), the Aguascalientes Prize. He has published several novels, short-story collections, and a book of essays. His translation into Spanish of the complete poems of Eugenio Montale appeared in 2006. Kathleen Snodgrass’s translations of contemporary Mexican poets have appeared in such journals as Northwest Review, Poetry London, Magenta, and Poetry International. Homeless How to orient the house, something I don’t even have? Some have it facing the sunrise; others, sunset. With no house as yet, I can have it facing the most minuscule things. I can have the house alongside the sea but with its back to it, facing what’s bewitched by the sea. I can orient the house by sudden intuitions at the cost of losing it, of never achieving it. I know each wall is the start of a new house, the glimpse of a potential house, another way of living. I want a house that doesn’t quench those gleanings, that doesn’t face a happy country, that’s always beginning, without mortal angles, decisive walls, or profound efforts (I’m tired of heroics). I want a house that can be heard, that doesn’t make corners or points, or foreseeable greenery. I want a house that returns to the first stone every day, that strips its walls in sleepers’ imaginations, and helps them fall asleep, a house open to all prophecy. Translations from the Spanish By Kathleen Snodgrass The Park At night, from my fifth floor, the park, now that overhead lights are broken, is as smooth as a hole, a black pit that swallows people. I hear steps but see no one. Who will escape harm? Maybe someone who knows how to shrink into insignificance, who grows so dark within he loses touch with the park, or someone passing through like a blind man who doesn’t want to see again, or someone as wrinkled as tree bark, as a stone, who sees all the wrinkles, sees that the park doesn’t clearly end, that there are no boundaries as we’ve been taught, that maybe nobody has a home, nobody’s ever returned, nobody has yet to find himself. ...