/ Translated from Spanish by Anthony Seidman.
Read the poems in Spanish here. /
Durability of Materials
L’Art est long et le Temps est court.
—Charles Baudelaire
The stone was here
before my birth, before
the birth of my father
and his father, my grandfather
and ten generations preceding,
and all the living beings
that people this planet
until this closing moment.
I can only kneel,
venerate the moisture
growing stronger as I sniff
its odor: a chunk of forest,
that ancient moisture
emanating from caves
sunken deep in time.
We will depart
and the stone
will remain in the plaza, erect,
atop the pile of its own bones
which do not crumble
with haste
unlike our
body parts.
Consistence of the world:
regard the mute corrosion
of flesh, so unlike the solidity
of millennia-laden textures; look,
the wasting envelopment,
the brittle bones sustaining
a tattered coat;
the stem which we ultimately are,
unlike the quarry or basalt
chilled by the alchemy of centuries.
Man is not older than stone,
nor does he reach as far
or outlive
what he has erected with his living pulse.
He endures less than his creations.
Biology Lesson
The bird is lighter
than the branch
in the garden of fragility.
Detaching, sliding
down, a drop
of water,
presses
the vertical weight of
its glass bead
on the leaf-veins.
Yet
the bird
perches among the cornices
like a marionette tugged by rain-strings.
We, on the other hand,
never cease
falling
just as the sky shatters
beneath the axe of thunder.
Earthlings, the ground demand us.
And thus, the only thing left
to us is to attack the flood´s inertia
and the bird´s ascent,
from a point of view which only
emphasizes the inability
of our life-form.
//
Jorge Ortega (b. 1972, Mexicali) is one of Mexico’s most celebrated contemporary poets. He studied Hispanic Philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, where he earned his doctorate. His recent collection, Devoción por la piedra (Mantis, México, 2016), won Mexico’s highly coveted poetry prize named in honor of Jaime Sabines, the Premio Internacional de Poesía Jaime Sabines of 2010. Other titles include Ajedrez de polvo (tsé-tsé, Buenos Aires, 2003), Estado del tiempo (Hiperión, Madrid, 2005) and Guía de forasteros (Bonobos, México, 2014). His work has been included in numerous anthologies in Mexico and the United States, including Across the Line. The Poetry of Baja California (Junction Press, San Diego, 2002). His poetry and translations of such poets as Hart Crane have appeared in such journals as Crítica, Letras Libres, Revista de Occidente, The Bitter Oleander, The Black Herald Review, Structo, World Literature Today, International Poetry Review and Poetry International.
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About the Translator:
Anthony Seidman is a poet and translator residing in Los Angeles, California. His work has been included in such journals as Chiron Review, Nimrod, World Literature Today, The Black Herald Review, Ambit, Cardinal Points, among other publications. He has a new collection of poetry entitled A Sleepless Man Sits Up In Bed (Eyewear, 2016). With David Shook, he is the co-translator of Confetti-Ash: Selected Poems by Salvador Novo (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2015).
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