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| LUIS BENÍTEZ |
LUIS BENÍTEZ
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FEARS
Ah the terrors that visit us by night
that do not hide from daytime
those not inspired by anything large
none unknown continent trodden just on the border
nor a loyal foe
openly sought on a rampart
nor the amazing eclipse that leaves midday in darkness
nor a terrible Lord of Armies
in deserts burnt by the sun of adventurous peoples
ah the fears the little fears of little men
not the fears that were in their manner the credit of an animal
naked in the enormous expanse of things that had
no name
not of being alone and standing
between an immense field and an immense sky
not of the shadow decorated by phosphorescent eyes
of death by night
between the teeth of the most beautiful animal on earth
a man's death
not of the fall propitiated by thunderbolt
of torrent of avalanche of fire of the earth
or of the other fire promised beneath the earth
ah the fears not created
by a terrible god out of the forest
nor a medieval relative with his retinue of witches and fetuses
nor the cold sweat face to face sword against sword
arrow against winchester dart against spear
death has shifted the words
it isn't the certainty of a burning rain
or the forecast of an insect carries amidst roots
finally also a good cause like the ancient plague
ah the fears you know
and that are mine exactly those
do not hide under the bed
do not need the cracking of wood the howl of nothing
haunt our dreams with faces and notes
they sleep and walk with us
drink feed always return.
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THE URUS
From behind time an animal is watching me:
it knows what I write because before me
it has already been a name. It is the urus.
Fancy takes it for a bull.
Sometimes it is a bird, a river, the wind
and at times, something leaving huge blood stains
in the boughs and a footstep
going away, solid, invisible.
It is not injured by the axe or the stone
of an archaic Europe not yet dreaming
of forging metals and History.
It is the urus. Sometimes a man
running away from himself.
A thinking animal longing to return to the woods
of eternal present, to haughty passions,
wrath, fury and violent death
of domination and zeal.
It is the urus. In its reddish eyes
there is something execrable.
We are terrified of his return and
Dionysus' with his retinue of fauns
and terror and night demolishing cities,
sinking us in the fire of hungry gods
demanding the earth, the light, the air.
Imaginations.
It is the urus. At the boundary of cities
all of this fits between his horns.
There where it remembers, one by one,
the treasons of man.
It does not ponder revenge or does it plan
to emerge from the night accomplice for retaliation
with its two daggers, if the terror
of returning were not enough to kill a man.
You cannot kill the dead. "I'm the urus.
Zeus took my shape to rape Europe.
Immutable, along the rolling of seasons
I have seen Phoenicians, Parthians, Greeks go by.
Time is only one day. I killed an immortal being
in the aurora and Sumeria and at noon
Plinius the Old described me enraptured.
Carthago lasted for an hour: Rome, maybe two.
The Luther boy feared me; I was already a legend.
A seventeenth century courtisan thought he extinguished me:
the soil over him hides his race,
his wife, his palace. That is the man:
dust swallowed by hills.
I am the urus, what is real. He is imaginary".
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JOHN KEATS
The useless daily chores fall over him.
John Keats remembers and remembrance is also others':
humiliations, countenances and words
make the repeated night out of a hole.
"Fanny Brawne, you have sent me away,
you have approached me to Keats and it was the same".
The Northern Sea sounds so distant
to become all the seas every second,
but if what it was and will be tomorrow shines
in his dark present time, this little man,
leaning on verse, senses it.
He senses he will be one and will be all
when the price of that multiple something is so high:
he will no longer be sheltered by the first fervor for words,
the lost fury of being alive will not sooth his hours
nor will he be protected by the requested night from any oblivion,
nothing will save him from so much
that is, in its measure, so little.
John Keats will be John Keats, he will be us.
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THE HAND
This hand I stretch out
and awaits you
is another vain prodigy,
another shallow miracle
of the infinite series
that surrounds us in silence.
In the morning that has left behind
the two vigils,
that of insomnia and that of sleep,
which is also possible,
I contemplate it at times with that but amazement
we retain for what is strange.
It has travelled all night with me.
Perhaps, I don't remember, it has touched
shapeless things.
At its touch, doors have opened
and perhaps non-existing
ramparts faced.
It has shaken with cold or has sweated
in unchanging climates. Possibly
it has been cut, just like in a night
of 1676, and remains intact.
It will travel with me all day long.
It is my mockery, it will turn locks,
it will touch what has been touched and others will touch.
Everything is an infinite handrail.
It will accept the treacherous friendship and try
to dissuade the threats, which are
but love misunderstandings among men.
And I don't scorn that hours of light
force it to minor roles:
light a cigarette or leave
the humiliation of alms,
they are a part of the mystery where the hand acts.
Like me, my hand is something existing
in the world to accept it all.
Now, in the afternoon,
when I contemplate what it is writing
these voices without the dignity of some precisions,
I darkly understand
the rags of its metaphor. Like a sacred book,
kept in zeal by the puzzle of its language,
another day has fallen off
at the passing of the hand.
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THE SEA OF THE ANCIENT
Never will the sea of the ancient return
to gather the shores created by its waves.
One year wide, a life long,
it sank in the deep mouthful of the bottom.
With it the crews of Erik the Violent
and the peaceful sail of another thief, a Phoenician,
rounded that soft horizon forever
and beneath the chasm that swallowed them all
as a book is shut.
Neither the frowning pirate who was once
tallness and tan and shadow,
nor the trader suffocated beneath a three-cornered hat and titles,
had the power to detain
those other waves that are called hours;
not even the multiple drowned one, that without a name,
can put his head out now
for his courageous persevering
beneath the moon, in loneliness.
Ah, sea of Aeneas and Ulysses
you were not this one and were
the dolphin's cradle and the spices
and the road of gold and always the Other.
How Portuguese and Spanish they were
when they were those who were at sea.
And the junk of that other history, the unknown,
that opened into it coming down the rivers
like a bough armed with an astrolabe,
with yellow men under the tight silk
keeping their secrets, their road and their signs!
Amidst the flying fish I see
the Roman trirreme riding
and the Greek vessel coming out of danger;
all of these ambitions seeking the Hesperides
stranded in the reef of the minute.
And the Mermaid, the heathenism on board
covered with scales and placed outside,
and officer Leviathan of the Old Testament,
condensed in the white whale
that, in the eighteen hundreds, still cut through
the beloved unforgettable sea of the ancient.
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