Kyle McCord
Poeta. EE.UU. Vive y enseña en Des Moines, Iowa.
Soy autor de cinco libros de poesía, incluyendo Gentle, World, Gentler (Ampersand 2015). Mi tercer libro fue seleccionado como uno de los cinco libros del año por Poetry Foundation blog. Tengo trabajos publicados en AGNI, Mirlo, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly y en otros lugares. He recibido subvenciones o premios de la Academia de Poetas Americanos, el Vermont Studio Center, y el Báltico Escritura Residencia. Yo co-edito: Un diario de Nueva Poesía American y American Microreviews y Entrevistas tengo un grado de un MFA de la Universidad de Massachusetts-Amherst y un Ph.D. de la Universidad del Norte de Texas.
Kyle es co-fundador del Younger American Poets Reading Series y co- editor de iO, Diario de la Nueva Poesía Americana.
También es profesor en el programa Creative Writing de la Universidad del Norte de Texas.
Ganador del Orphic Poetry Book Prize en el 2008 con Galley of the Beloved in Torment.
Traducción de Raúl Racedo
Flor amarga, no mueras solitaria en un holocausto nuclear
(Don Die alone In a Nuclear Holocaust,Bitter Flower)
La posición más difícil para morir durante un holocausto nuclear:
Comiendo una bolsa de conos solitariamente, mucho después de que todos dejaron la oficina. Llevar a casa el esqueleto mohoso. Dejar las grampas dispersas. Y el cartucho de toner sobre la limpia cáscara de la multitud incinerada en la entrada.
Las cortinas del Ruan Center cuelgan preocupadas sobre el bar del distrito, el que fue bautizado por los delincuentes. Yo tenía por costumbre llevar mujeres a ése tejado.
Mis miembros crecieron sin aprender demasiado, excepto que hay un pequeño misterio en el funcionamiento de las cosas.
Lo que resulta increíble es que el fermento de levadura tiene como agregado una medida de dopamina que te será imposible gobernar durante el resto de tu vida.
Porque al diseñar la tapa de una revista, el objetivo de documentar la vergüenza no conseguirá activarte como el Señor ¨Resolvamos- este asunto- en-el- lavarropas.¨
Corrección:
La peor posición para morir: en el interior del sótano ubicado debajo del placard de una bailarina exótica -como Jenny Holden-, la de séptimo grado, quien fue, de cualquier modo, familiar para mí.
Lo peor del final es el deseo por cualquier otra cosa que ya hayas tenido; el cuarto en el que mi hermana y yo mirábamos el cielo de coral que se desplazaba como una visión. Muffin, el cocker spaniel; y ese libro de cocina en el living; ésta sopa de minestrón- El cielo y la tierra pasarán, pero estas palabras nunca pasaran
Canción de Amor en el estilo de Ramona
(Love Son in the Style of Ramona)
Hiciste la tierra de los muertos demasiado larga y, eventualmente,
llegaron los delirantes chicos. Yo amaba la manera como apilabas
tus víctimas en el álbum de fotos. O cuando apretabas mis esqueléticos muslos.
Yo amaba a las tontas masas que te amaban.
¨Ellos no tienen decencia-decías.
Para nosotros, quiero frazadas, de gatos negros -dije yo.
Porque aunque la brisa haya podido desalojarnos de nuestros cuerpos, la indefinida arena morada de Big Sur coagulará mis sueños.
Quería llamarte desde la playa.
Lo hice. Una mota de pasas frente a una eternidad de acantilados.
Veloces imágenes sosteniéndose sobre su propio cuerpo, tal cual vos lo hacés en los sueños cercanos a la muerte. Te ves tan tonta con el negro -azulado de la tintura para el pelo que ha salpicado tu almohada con violetas. Yo soñaba con traducir esas flores en un lenguaje tardío , pero tu arte, con su intensidad sexual, electrificó a la comunidad de los muertos vivos.
-Abraham Lincoln con sus botones dorados comienza a arrancarte la blusa. En tus plumas para los ojos, aparece la clara y eterna diosa erótica. Por supuesto, eras rusa. Por supuesto, la muerte no discute sobre tales cosas, dijiste. Lo admito, la muerte no tiene palabras amistosas; sin embargo tiene miles de palabras para los ciegos.
Still Are the Strings of the Ancients
About us, the quality or lack of our luminescence,
we'll never make up our mind.
Evils we do or don't
(little good it does)
refract, depending, as they do,
on our angle of vantage.
The light that does, (the good)
we take for granted:
the yard lit whether we wake it or not.
The light that doesn't,
should it reach our cornea
some night when the ancestors allow,
we would never forget.
But barring these,
minus praise or antipathy,
an object, say a hand
turning a room into view,
continues its present course unabated.
By comparison or resistance,
we become not-our-father,
permitting a part of him to live on
in antithesis
when we were happy enough
to see him surface a last time
from the myriad cancers and go.
We were happy enough
to travel and to be broken
and later to be reconstituted into statues.
To surmise this as bravery
in our friends and to continue on
in the copper heart.
Even if it clangs and knocks,
even if it recognizes no one.
Dolphins, the Scientists are Discussing Your Enormous Brains
They break out champagne in the break room, in the lab, in the streets
they are talking you up at all the parties.
But, I’ve never seen you
in the library after hours when I am shuffling through the awful cement maze,
never witnessed a dolphin tending the wounded at an accident.
Bring me the one you call, Dr. Dolphin.
Outside my childhood home was a decrepit barn
where the floor rotted in and all our rain corralled there.
In the grotto, you could see yourself, the barn
all upside down, broken in.
This is my world to you—
vandalized, nails jutting one odd direction or another?
A child points to the horizon where one of your kind clears a fiery ring
while Johnny Cash plays his best despite being entombed in a small town in Tennessee.
At the great conferences of the world, the scientists have forgotten themselves
in furious debate over your frontal cortex.
They worry you will come to worship data as we do
while your beak’s stuck in some plastic bottling.
Meaning, in the heat of love, we may forget to love.
There are reasons to fear what is tender.
Epistle Written in the Shadow of a Metal-Mache Horse
The poems discolored my life also, Frank. Honest. And now
these friends, this scrap iron horse is all I have to show.
I’m proud, Frank. Tired, Frank. My father’s house is a frame
whose functions I hear but can’t accurately interpret.
Sarah dated a skinny goat by your same name then broke his heart—
banging a fifty-year-old plumber while he
passed out on a pile of coats. He was one of the good ones, Frank
so buy him a scotch at the next convention.
Sarah was beautiful in a way that’s hard to forget
which was all I asked for for my birthday and got it
buried myself in another woman in Maine. Then the poems
dissipated all that into an afternoon of dusks, and it was 2007.
I had tape on my fingers and glue in my hair. Mangled innards
of a shoe. Many hopeful impressions of you. Let’s go back
to your image of a mesa and your unwritten novel of Sancho Panza’s
exploration of the Mexican West. Why did you bring me here?
Sancho asks. To have a heart is to risk it. To forge ahead, to live alone.
To go up as fire you must be frightfully burdened
and more human than anything.
Poem for My Thirty-Seven Mistresses
Poor, dirty, and wretched, living in a city full of crumbling ceilings
is no way to spend your early twenties.
I’m prepared to test an ordinary existence. To grow basil or sage.
To cultivate hobbies into age the way a sailor might carry
a compass even after it shatters. You arrived at this earlier.
Brewed sweet tea, baked biscuits while I shaved my head
in pursuit of black-haired dervishes. Lean, angular women fit for wit
and worship, not Sunday afternoon at the store
and so I spent it by myself writing bizarre fanfiction where Pikachu suffers from pica
and the whole crew learns a valuable lesson about the dangers of ingesting
paint chips.
I keep my soap in a bag, my books in boxes; hide in the bathroom
and run water just to blot out my thoughts. Skin stained
from washing, a halo of epidermal products above, and I conceived all I wanted
was Illinois. Like my cousins who marry young
separate old and behind the high school the wind blows
new women into town. But, Robert, I’m a fool
for the stars who go down. My pillow’s a face
I don’t remember. You’re looking at the last Soviet superman
eating a bowl of granola.
I Write You This on a Train Named For an Endangered Bird
There are ways a story can’t begin. Like pitting your protagonist
against an all-knowing, all-seeing jaguar spirit.
Or, worse, against an abstraction—like immorality or human unhappiness.
It could be argued that Hamlet’s vengeance was doomed from the outset
because you can’t fight for the dead, only against the living
who have enough problems as it is. Your Canadian brother-in-law
unemployed, rubs his knuckles while he sleeps.
A whole range of unadorable animals are on the docket for extinction.
I’ve identified some plot problems here. Like on New Year’s
when Jeremy A’s sister blew you in the bathroom
and midway through they threw you out of the house
without your high-tops: was no way to begin a story, and it did.
And I refuse to put bread on anyone’s tongue and pretend it’s flesh
to put cigarettes and fruit on a grave and pretend I intended it
more than an hour before. Why should it mean less?
The Confederate dead who haunt your city. Jeremy A’s sister
years later aboard the California Zephyr. The blood rushing to your extremities
the makeshift fan, the Mahler left open.
Even now, you can’t play it perfectly—notes too far, too fast.
What do you want from any of us, reader? Elegy? Epiphany?
I am hunted by an all-knowing spirit who grows a shade over my head one day
and withers it the next.
Love Poem in San Antonio with Mythical Animals
Most of what isn’t real begins in the woods: the wendigo,
Ginny from San Antonio who drew intricate vulture beaks.
This scrub, is it real? This scorpion? Friends aren’t friends
when they badger you into visiting an abandoned cabin
long after one in the morning. When I want
to be more than the warm body beside you, I’m not your friend.
I don’t want there to be any question that I mean this:
that I love my father, says Ginny. Even if I wasn’t
what he wanted, what is real is this compass, this house,
the twenty-four years of life lived in it. She points to a picture.
I lay there for hours while she shivers into who could be anyone
this tent a devil sketched in the margin of wilderness.
I think about how you are lucky, you out there.
Your days are better for their tangibility.
You are wiping off a table out where nothing can touch you
rabid rain and the sound of it seeping through.
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