The Problem of Hunger
If it weren’t for poetry,
we’d see things differently.
We’d have a job,
a house,
an orchard,
a field,
some olive trees –
we’d have solid things,
if it weren’t for poetry.
Now we don’t.
The orchards aren’t enough for us,
the fields,
the olive trees –
the house doesn’t fill us.
You go out and still don’t get enough.
You hunger as the clouds pass by;
we hunger, I tell you.
That’s how we see things:
through hunger.
The Chess Problem
Chess, if you think it through,
is but a game
of pretextual slowness,
that is, a game of despair.
While everyone hurries for the fall of the sorrowful palace,
they know that in the end, someone else will be the victor.
That despair eats away at their insides,
turns them into pawns
that blindly fall into battle.
Every pawn hurries for the game to be over,
for the torment and the slaughter to be over.
Diagonal moves, damages of the daily grind,
tactics for memorizing probabilities,
applications of older despairs,
shouts, clangs, commands – the silence;
there are no prisoners here.
The pawns are falling dead
and the first to fall are the most desperate ones:
the pawns without a rank,
those that will never see
either victories or defeats,
because the desperate are always in a hurry.
This is our greatest and fiercest
chess problem.
The Problem of Silence
The problem starts from silence
and in silence the problem ends.
In between, there’s the sound of a wheel –
like a train leaving irrevocably
for never, for nowhere, and for ever –
a sound of acute silence
minting both coins
and hidden forgeries;
it is Spinoza grinding eyeglasses.
He doesn’t speak, he grinds the questions:
How moral is it to remain silent?
How moral is it to die of silence?
For centuries now, Spinoza has been dying
breathing in the dust stirred by the wheel.
Spinoza puts on his glasses.
He looks outside: it’s snowing.
He looks inside: it’s snowing.
nearly dead from exhaustion,
Spinoza
grinds the snow of moment,
turns it into time.
The Problem of Frida Kahlo
We are going to be on time
at the place where Frida Kahlo
will paint her double portrait.
For now, she’s testing her blood,
arranging the transfusion tubes
from one world to another
so there’s no flow problem.
Dawn is breaking.
Frida Kahlo stands with her hand raised,
but something’s off:
the moment turns to universal time,
pain is recycled, not transfused,
the brush hangs suspended
like a sickle before climax;
the axe of Ramón Mercader howls
inside Trotsky’s mask
and inside Diego Rivera’s mask.
A dead end.
Then Frida Kahlo lays the first stroke,
and the blood of the whole world
begins to run.
The Problem of Multiplication
I watched his head tumble.
There was sunlight.
(The days are sunny
when killers are born.)
Then I saw her head,
then I saw his head again,
then hers once more.
Then I saw their heads multiplied.
Later on, I lost count.
Like watching, multiplied,
an enormous Zabriskie Point.
Go forth, children–children of Zabriskie Point, I whispered,
and just as I was, in my work clothes,
I stepped outside, into the polluted years;
and to this day I haven’t seen
anything more whole than their heads
tumbling down, thundering,
through my sleep and my waking.
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