ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING [16.520]

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Poeta y ensayista Alison Hawthorne Deming nació en Connecticut en 1946 y recibió una maestría de la Universidad de Vermont College. Ella es autora of Rope (Penguin, 2009); Genius Loci (2005); The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (Louisiana State University Press, 1997); and Science and Other Poems (1994), que fue seleccionada por Gerald Stern, para recibir el 1993 Premio Walt Whitman.

Directora de la Universidad de Arizona Centro de Poesía desde 1990 hasta 2000, es actualmente profesora asociada en Escritura Creativa en la Universidad de Arizona y vive en Tucson.

Escalera al cielo

La reina engorda bajo mi casa
mientras drones infestan las paredes

reconocimiento para saciar su exceso,
madera arrancada de tablas y vigas.

Pagaré para taladrar la losa y arruinar
su nido pestilente. ¿Cómo encontrar

la canción en las oraciones de hoy?
he sido acusada de oscuridad

por mi luz interna. Mi hermano se sienta
en la silla de la quimio para otro largo día

de infusión tóxica, la casa de su cuerpo-
huesos, cerebro y huevos temblando

me siento en mi carro escuchando
a Robert Plant recordando cómo lo ingleses

envidiaban a los americanos por haber recibido
el blues, obtenerlo todo, en canciones.

Recuerdo el sueño donde
hermano y hermana, adultos e iguales,

delgados y blancos como lirios, tan desnudos,
bucearon en el agua de montaña, agua oscura,

gran elevación, abetos creciendo
en agua de inundación que había unido

dos lagos como uno. ¿Alguna vez sueñas
con animales?, le pregunto, camilla

viendo hacia una ardilla de madera
en una pared de bloque de cemento.

Frecuentemente. Un aire de alegría sorpresiva. ¿De qué tipo?
Mayormente animales de selva. Entonces: Voy

a hacer mis ejercicios ahora. ¿Qué ejercicios?
Me gusta la caminata, dijo, inmóvil

en su nido de muerte de nueve almohadas.
Entonces cerró sus ojos para convertirse en el ser interior

cuyo única tarea era mantener un camino
de ida y de vuelta dentro de su área.

Versión en español por Esteban López Arciga

Stairway to Heaven

The queen grows fat beneath my house
while drones infest the walls

reconnaissance to feed her glut,
wood ripped from studs and joists.

I’ll pay to drill the slab and ruin
her pestilential nest. How to find

the song in this day’s summons?
I’ve been accused of darkness

by my inner light. My brother sits
in the chemo chair another long day

of toxic infusion, the house of his body—
bones, brain and balls gone skeltering.

I sit in my parked car listening
to Robert Plant recall how the English

envied the Americans for getting
the blues, getting all of it, into song.

I remember the dream where
brother and sister, adult and equal,

lean and white as lilies, as bare,
dove into a mountain lake, black water,

high elevation, fir trees growing
in flood water that had joined

two lakes into one. Do you ever dream
of animals, I ask him, hospice bed

looking out on a plywood squirrel
perched on cement block wall.

Frequently. A lilt of surprising joy. What kind?
Mostly the jungle animals. Then: I’m going

to do my exercises now. What exercises?
I like pacing, he said, immobilized

upon his death nest of nine pillows.
Then he closed his eyes to become the inward one

whose only work was to wear a pathway
back and forth within his enclosure.

Hábitat humano

Hubo quien no quiso alterar el diseño
cuando el mensaje
advirtió un problema masivo con el oxígeno.
Algunos querían vivir de lleno con el riesgo.

Para entonces éramos demasiado débiles para el quehacer diario:
alimentar pollo, palear raíces,
calibrar pH esto N2 lo otro…
se sentía como medía escalada al Everest.

No esperábamos que las abejas
murieran. El cristal bloqueó la luz
de gran onda que las guía.
La tierra de siembra demasiado rica en microbios

El concreto fresco se comió el oxígeno.
Tuvimos problemas de presión,
re-calibrando la máquina. Con huesos cansados
releí mi Aristóteles bajo luz menguante.

El ser es un hecho o un potencial.
El hecho es anterior a la sustancia.
El hombre anterior al chico, el humano anterior a la semilla,
Hermes anterior al cincel golpeando madera.

Hojeé el Turner’s England
dejé el libro abierto en Stonehenge.
Un pastor golpeado por un rayo yace muerto,
perro aullando, muchas ovejas muertas también.

El pintor le dio proporciones enormes
a las nubes sulfurosas montadas por dios
rayos desgarrando un cielo índigo
mientras piedras caídas yacen cercanas

religión muerta, páginas polvosas
fragmentos de hojas marrones se juntan
en la coladera pero no logro cambiar de página
preguntándome qué soy y cuándo

en la historia de mi vida mi vida está sucediendo.
Ahora qué. Ni pastor. Ni catedral.
¿Cómo es entonces que leo amor
en las páginas que yacen abiertas ante mí?

Versión en español por Esteban López Arciga

Human Habitat

Some did not want to alter the design 

when the failure message 

said massive problem with oxygen. 

Some wanted to live full tilt with risk.

By then we were too weak for daily chores: 

feeding chickens, hoeing yams, 

calibrating pH this and N2 that . . . 

felt like halfway summiting Everest.

We didn’t expect the honeybees 

to die. Glass blocked the long-wave 

light that guides them. 

Farm soil too rich in microbes

concrete too fresh ate the oxygen. 

We had pressure problems, 

recalibrating the sniffer. Bone tired 

I reread Aristotle by waning light.

Being is either actual or potential. 

The actual is prior to substance. 

Man prior to boy, human prior to seed, 

Hermes prior to chisel hitting wood.

I leafed through Turner’s England , 

left the book open at Stonehenge. 

A shepherd struck by lightning lies dead, 

dog howling, several sheep down too.

The painter gave gigantic proportion 

to sulphurous god rimmed clouds 

lightning slashing indigo sky 

while close at hand lie fallen stones

dead religion, pages dusty 

brown leaf shards gathering 

in the gutter yet I cannot turn the page 

wondering what I am and when

in the story of life my life is taking place. 

Now what. No shepherd. No cathedral. 

How is it then that I read love 

in pages that lie open before me?

LOS NATURALISTAS

Cuando los naturalistas

ven un montón de excrementos,

corren hacia ellos

como si una rara orquídea

hubiera florecido en su camino.

Desmenuzan

los zurullos desecados

recuperan un grueso

pelo negro de jabalí

o la cáscara de un piñón

como si desenterraran gemas.

Se arrodillan

la nariz en las flores,

a un micrómetro de distancia- flores del vientre,

les llaman, porque se aprecia mejor

lo que hay debajo

si se está acostado. Lomatium,

calabaza búfalo, criptógamas

para ellos son indicios de

parte de la memoria genética

fosilizada en sus cerebros,

una antigua música que intentan

recordar porque,

a pesar de que no pueden

escuchar la melodía, saben

que la podrían cantar

que incluso su propia naturaleza

ira, lujuria, muerte

y terrores parecerían

tan hermosos como las

algas endolíticas

que liberan nitrógeno

en las rocas para que

los enebros puedan ordeñarlas.

http://elestablodepegaso.blogspot.com.es/

Eve Revisited

Pomegranates fell from the trees

in our sleep. If we stayed

in the sun too long

there were aloes

to cool the burn.

Henbane for predators

and succulents when the rain was scarce.

There was no glorified past

to point the way

true and natural

for the sexes to meet.

He kept looking to the heavens

as if the answer were anywhere

but here. I was so bored

with our goodness

I couldn’t suck the juice

from one more pear.

It’s here, I kept telling him,

here, rooted in the soil

like every other tree

you know. And I wove us

a bed of its uppermost branches.

First Encounter Beach

Eastham, Massachusetts

One of the spectators is disappointed

there isn’t a guide to explain

the beaching, the scientists busy

cutting into ninety-four pilot whales

stranded on the salt grass.

No one knows why and, try as the rescue team

might, not one whale will go back to water.

So they’re injected to speed up the dying,

lined up like lumber and sawed into,

except when the black skin splits

we can’t stop staring, their meat is so red.

I don’t want to know why this happens—

what parasite or geomagnetic anomaly

finished their love of motion. Why should

anything have to leave this world

when water can cycle from atmosphere

down to land, the ocean and back

to forgiving sky.

           I’m on my way to Connecticut

where my father has a little vegetation

on his heart valve—that’s how the intern

describes it, trying to minimize

the danger of him slipping

into a haze so cold, some nights,

bone-cold, his hand can’t get from

his plate to his mouth.

      Rain slicks the highway

slowing me down. The same water

fattened into snow in the woods

of my childhood, the whiteness

unbroken except where my father

cut trails and taught me to ski,

laying down the herringbone behind him

as he broke up hills that left me

with legs made of slush. He wanted me strong,

no patience for pain. No choice

but to find the muscle to follow. Even now

when he boasts how I zigzagged

the breakneck hills in an icestorm,

there’s no hint of my knee-chattering fear,

slats skittering out of control,

each run a victory of luck more than will,

each ride up the lift a prayer for my bones.

I wonder how it is for him now

there in the ward where whiteness can’t hide

the cold blank that’s ahead. When the whales

beached, spectators came like pilgrims,

each new arrival scanning the faces

of those heading back to their cars

to see how it changed them

to survey so much death. Nothing showed.

Their eyes followed the asphalt,

heads bent in private devotion.

    There in a room

where others have died, my father

keeps a record of each test and drug.

He watches medicine drip into his arm

and circle in the dark of his blood.

I believe it will heal him, as I believe

in the strength of my blood

to protect me from failures of will. Once

when my grandmother at ninety-six

lay delirious with pneumonia,

pitching on her high horsehair bed,

she saw three crows perched on the dresser.

              They smell so awful, she said.

Please, open the window. Let them out.

It was my father who did what she asked.

And the crows flew out, carrying her fever

over the treeline, dissolving into sky,

and she lived. Whatever she saw,

by love, luck or dumb Yankee will,

it was true. That’s what I mean by medicine.

Science

Then it was the future, though what’s arrived   

isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and   

cybernetics, when we set up exhibits

in the cafeteria for the judges

to review what we’d made of our hypotheses.

The class skeptic (he later refused to sign   

anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental   

degradation of language) chloroformed mice,   

weighing the bodies before and after

to catch the weight of the soul,

wanting to prove the invisible

real as a bagful of nails. A girl

who knew it all made cookies from euglena,

a one-celled compromise between animal and plant,   

she had cultured in a flask.

We’re smart enough, she concluded,

to survive our mistakes, showing photos of farmland,   

poisoned, gouged, eroded. No one believed

he really had built it when a kid no one knew   

showed up with an atom smasher, confirming that

the tiniest particles could be changed   

into something even harder to break.

And one whose mother had cancer (hard to admit now,   

it was me) distilled the tar of cigarettes   

to paint it on the backs of shaven mice.

She wanted to know what it took,

a little vial of sure malignancy,

to prove a daily intake smaller

than a single aspirin could finish

something as large as a life. I thought of this

because, today, the dusky seaside sparrow

became extinct. It may never be as famous

as the pterodactyl or the dodo,

but the last one died today, a resident

of Walt Disney World where now its tissue samples

lie frozen, in case someday we learn to clone

one from a few cells. Like those instant dinosaurs

that come in a gelatin capsule—just add water   

and they inflate. One other thing this

brings to mind. The euglena girl won first prize

both for science and, I think, in retrospect, for hope.

.