ROBERT WRIGLEY [13.944]

Robert Wrigley 

(1951,  East St. Louis, EE.UU.) Ha merecido distinciones como el Kinsley Tufts Poetry Award, el 2005 Poet’s Prize y el  San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award. Ha obtenido becas como el National Endowment por the Arts y la de la Guggenheim Foundation. Penguin publicó el 2006 su Beautiful Country, Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems.

He has published poems in a number of journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic, Barrow Street, and The New Yorker. In 2003 and 2006 he had poems published in Best American Poetry, and in 2013, his poem "Religion" appeared in The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, selected by Robert Pinsky. Wrigley is also the recipient of six Pushcart prizes. Reign of Snakes won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Lives of the Animals won the 2005 Poets' Prize. In the Bank of Beautiful Sins won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award.

Después de un aguacero

Como he llegado hasta el corral y es de noche

los caballos se acercan desde el antiguo establo.

Dejan que acaricie sus largas caras, y yo noto

a la luz de la luna que ahora emerge,

como ellos, un Morgan y un Cuarto de Milla,  traen

sus grupas moteadas por una lluvia

convulsa, transformados así en

Apalusas, los caballos ancestrales de este lugar.

Quizás  porque es de noche, están nerviosos,

o quizás porque ellos también saben

en qué se han convertido, me parece

que esperan verme hablar

con los viejos fantasmas que aún merodearan,

y ver si logro despertarlos de este sueño confuso,

en el cual hay establos y corrales y un hombre

que no sabe una palabra que ellos comprendan.

 Traducido por el poeta nicaragüense Francisco Larios

After a Rainstorm

Because I have come to the fence at night,

the horses arrive also from their ancient stable.

They let me stroke their long faces, and I note

in the light of the now-merging moon

how they, a Morgan and a Quarter, have been

by shake-guttered raindrops

spotted around their rumps and thus made

Appaloosas, the ancestral horses of this place.

Maybe because it is night, they are nervous,

or maybe because they too sense

what they have become, they seem

to be waiting for me to say something

to whatever ancient spirits might still abide here,

that they might awaken from this strange dream,

in which there are fences and stables and a man

who doesn’t know a single word they understand.

Religión

Lo último que la perra, ya anciana, trajo a casa

de sus peregrinaciones por el bosque,

fue un zapato de hombre, un negro y todavía reluciente punto-en-ala.

En un principio temí que hubiese en él un pie.

Pero no, no era más que un zapato ordinario.

Y aunque claramente alguien lo había calzado,

la boca de la perra—

una cobradora, hábil recolectando patos y gansos—

era tan suave, que el zapato estaba aún en buena condición

y yo podría habérselo entregado

a algún amigo sin pierna

pero ya todos ellos vestían sus prótesis,

o sea que ahí estaba: Un zapato salvado,

o robado, y non.  Aunque en los últimos meses

de la vida de la perra, noté

que el zapato se había convertido en su amigo, casi,

un cuerpo a cuyo lado o sobre el cual dormía,

y siempre, al pasar, olfateaba

como asegurándose de que

en su ausencia, el misterioso, consabido,

ausente pie, no hubiese regresado.

 Traducido por el poeta nicaragüense Francisco Larios

Religion

The last thing the old dog brought home

from her pilgrimages through the woods

was a man’s dress shoe, a black, still-shiny wing-tip.

I feared at first a foot might be in it.

But no, it was just an ordinary shoe.

And while it was clear it had been worn,

and because the mouth of the dog —

a retriever, skilled at returning ducks and geese —

was soft, the shoe remained a good shoe

and I might have given it

to a one-legged friend

but all of them dressed their prostheses too,

so there it was. A rescued

or a stolen odd shoe. Though in the last months

of the dog’s life, I noticed

how the shoe became her friend, almost,

something she slept on or near

and nosed whenever she passed,

as though checking it to see if,

in her absence, that mysterious, familiar,

missing foot, might not have come again.

A Lock of Her Hair

As a hoodoo-voodoo, get-you-back-to-me tool,

this hank’s thankless task is vast,

a head down to the ground impossibility, possibly,

since what I’m thinking of is your toe pad pinknesses too,

your soup hots and round-and-rounds, the fine

and perfect poundage of you on my paws, the very cause

and problem I moan and bemoan

the absence of. For Love, above the head

this reddish coil once lavishly wore, there’s an air so far away

it’s sad for me to even think the same sun’s rays play

where it was and do to you what I would do

if I were there or you were here. Still, some thrills

remembered do resemble thrills, one hopes, and the ropes

of it that gently fell around me bound me so well

no hell of miles can defile this dream I dream. I mean

the anyway DNA I can find of you. I mean the home

of bones and blood that holds the whole of you

and which this fizzed-up missive means to conjure, missy,

my world in a curl, girl, this man oh man half man I am

when you’re gone.