by Sergio Badilla Castillo

My nickname is conspicuous here in Munich’s bohemian quarter
among orthodox Jews and immigrants from the East.
In the inns of the Rialto a couple of painters
and some redheaded whores are knocking back gin and beer.
The night is bright in secret places where the moon peeps in.
Drunk in his studio what music
did Kandinsky hear? Was it Moskva or Kubanskaya
vodka that unleashed his madness?
In Cairo Nina wakens from a nightmare
about a lonely boy at play in lonely snow.
Vassily in his narrow bed yearns for the delineated breasts
of Gabriele, for his drunken paintbrush
her thighs as tight as a slightly built Valkyrie’s.
She cries because Vassily cries for her in Moscow:
A damsel in pink / ducks in flight / a baroness’s portrait.
What does it matter! Piano and cello are in the same house still.
I lose sight of him, then surprise him
in Neuilly sur Seine with Paul Klee (drinking Pernod by the river).
Terrible souls are captured in grays and chiaroscuros.
Moholy–Nagy / with his virtuoso camera / freezes his gestures
as he paints a seemingly motionless triangle.
The paintbrush smudges time and softens shades
and Vassily is obsessive because he’s a melancholy genius
before whom God falls silent in the utter dark of night.

Translated by Roger Hickin & Sergio Badilla Castillo

by Sergio Badilla Castillo

In Avellaneda Pizarnik surprises me
with a look of devastation wrought
by the sullen city’s shadows.
Each of us has his own gibberish
in this nightmarish myth that chews
the facts and their dubious skin to bits.
Which Artaud surely knew in Ivry–sur–Seine
without his circle of friends unmindful of his genius.
How to say my face does not forget your grief —
a bird whose blasphemies attempt to clutch elusive life.
Oliverio is like Lange and Orozco a worldly diva murmuring a poem
by Gérard Labrunie.
                    Across the lobby
Porchia and Juarroz open a secret door
to make a Dante–esque escape into death’s blackness.
Witold — safely deaf — professes to follow nothing.
He eyes us with the foolish fixity of a spectre
since the dryads there acquiesce in his coldness —
those virtuous ones with knives under their ponchos
in all that crowded confusion.

Avellaneda: a suburb of Buenos Aires. Alejandro Pizarnik was born there.

Oliverio: Oliverio Girondo.

Lange: Norah Lange. Borges was at one time in love with Norah Lange,
and considered suicide when she refused him. Norah and Oliverio
married in 1943. Both distanced themselves from Borges.

Gérard Labrunie: better known by his nom -de -plume Gérard de Nerval.

Witold: Witold Gombrowicz.

Translated by Roger Hickin & Sergio Badilla Castillo

by Sergio Badilla Castillo

Something made Vallejo afraid in public places, on the side streets adjoining the Jardin de Luxembourg / in ’20s Paris / approaching the quarter of the old chestnuts where the city / full of trees / seemed to smell of the Peruvian jungle. At 207 Boulevard Raspail, stuck in his solitary room, he would wait for a friend to come / or in the end / for a bunch of ghosts, victims like himself, to lift his spirits. Looking at his grave in Montparnasse Cemetery, I believe nostalgia corroded his universe and his soul, and that recurrent silences wrecked his confidence.

In ’27, his spirit infected by timidity, humiliated and homesick / on November 15th / he is admitted, poor and malnourished, to the Maison de la Santé de la Charié. There for some days he remains in an off–white room, his startled black eyes fixed on the ceiling. He lacks the 60 Peruvian pounds necessary for the journey from Madrid to Callao. Santiago de Chuco appears green again in his uncertain memory and perhaps he weeps.

On an earth where Spain is self–destructing / in a Civil War / his vitality runs dry and he knows he can no longer live with smashed utopias in his mind. His daily madness is the result of poverty, but he has always known that his life will end in Paris, that he will depart cadaverous / oppressed / by rumors of man’s perverse self–devastation and destruction. Georgette is not there, nor are his friends Gerardo Diego, Juan Larrea, or Juan Gris. It will be an almost secret death / a fate with none of the fullness of a victory.

Translated by Roger Hickin

by David Cope

white dawnlight thru my windows, thru fronds of cycad & spathphylum — fierce light after months of storm & sigh, turning from death to death —

now foreclosures — gruff men once hipsters or marines hair trimmed back after thirty years, pushing mowers snowblowers shooting hoops with kids

thin women with long hair & hard wise eyes, tough women at the mailbox, all gone after long decades, houses gone dark, curtainless windows, empty

driveway — fat cats disappear with millions after shanking the economy, thousands tramping streets, fruitless, families coming apart nowhere to go.

after painting ceiling where roof leak burst thru last summer, I sit alone silently & listen, tender moments passing, ephemeral yet precious after

so much death & sorrow. In my dream, we scatter roses on the river in July where last year we spread our mother’s ashes, just upstream from her old

bedroom, near moraine bank where I once risked all to save a  drowning dog, clambering across ice & falling in myself, later feted on evening news —

the procession of the dead, everyday dia de muertos, mother father mentor brother father of a friend now racing thru my brains, their fragile memory

all that remains — easily scattered, lost, erased to all in deadline & routine: thus this fierce light thru fronds raising my eye to this day, this touch.