JUDY JORDAN [18.876]

Judy Jordan 

1961. Poeta. EE.UU.

Creció en una pequeña granja cerca de la frontera de Carolina. Sus padres eran aparceros. Fue la primera de su familia en asistir a la universidad, con una licenciatura en Artes de la Universidad de Virginia en 1990, y una Maestría en Bellas Artes en 1995. Obtuvo además Maestría en Bellas Artes, en ficción de la Universidad de Utah, en 2000. Vivió en Salt Lake City.

Enseñó en la Universidad de Virginia, Piedmont Virginia Community College y la Universidad del Estado de California, San Marcos. Es profesora en la Southern Illinois University Carbondale. 

Vive en una cabaña que ella misma construyó en el bosque nacional de Shawnee, y está trabajando en un libro de no ficción acerca de sus experiencias allí.

Sus poemas han aparecido en Raintaxi, Blue Pitcher Review , Crossroads: A Journal of Southern Culture, Lucid Oona, Poetry, Western Humanities Review, and Writer's Eye.

Premios 

1999 Walt Whitman Award

2000 National Book Critics Circle Award [7]

1996 Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

Obras 

"A Taste for Falling"; "In the 25th Year of My Mother's Death", National Public Radio

Poesía

Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems . Louisiana State University Press. 2000. ISBN 978-0-8071-2556-4 .

Jordan, Judy (2008). Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance A Poem. ISBN 978-0-8071-2996-8 .

Antologías

Gerald Costanzo, Jim Daniels, ed. (2000). American poetry: the next generation. Carnegie Mellon University Press. ISBN 978-0-88748-343-1.

Patrice Vecchione, ed. (2007). Faith and Doubt: An Anthology of Poems. Patrice Vecchione. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-8050-8213-5.

La traducción al español es de Tania Márquez Aragón.

 http://circulodepoesia.com/2016/06/american-poetry-judy-jordan/

Una pequeña gota a la Nada

No puedo decir qué de este día o de su carencia

me ha hecho tediosa en este muelle flotante

a la deriva del sesgo y arrebato del agua,

con el sol indiferente, saco de pesada semilla,

trémulo sobre los pinos derrama su paja.

Gansos se elevan desde la lejana colina en la última luz,

desplegados sobre los alisos, descienden y rozan la laguna

y no sé cuánto más puedo esperar

como el viento, oliendo a hoja podrida y estiércol,

la tarde se arrastra sobre esta ensombrecida tierra.

A Short Drop to Nothing

I can’t say what of this day or its lack

has caused me to weary on this floating dock

in the drift of the water’s warp and wrest,

with the indifferent sun, that seed-heavy sack,

tremulous over the pines, spilling its chaff.

Geese lift from the far hill in the last light,

unfurl above alders, dip and scrape across the pond,

and I don’t know how much longer I can wait

as the wind, smelling of leaf rot and dung,

tugs the evening over this darkening land.

Ayúdame a salar, ayúdame a doler

(fragmento)

No, es 1969-

El año que mi madre se convierte en cera,

mira a la niña que fui,

ella gotea sobre el satín rosado

y yo aprendí el olor funerario del clavel.

Ese año la luna todavía estaba hecha de queso.

Ese año los hombres empaquetaron y etiquetaron esa luna.

No hay años, solo el pasado

y todavía no sé por qué Odell Horne

disparó un arma contra mi hermano

o cómo el cuerpo contiene tanta sangre.

Todavía no sé por qué Donna Hill fue a la playa Myrtle

y regresó muerta tres días después.

Viví con Louise Stegall por diez años,

la amante de mi padre, uno de sus cuatro hombres, todos enterrados-

suicidio, asesinato, alcoholismo, asesinato otra vez.

Fue después del segundo que se quedó

quieta y callada en el asilo, por cuatro años.

Ahora camina por las calles todo el día

recogiendo golosinas

para darle a los niños valientes

que se acercan lo suficiente a ella.

Cuando tenía nueve años el estornino picoteo su ventana una semana entera.

Alguien va a morir, dijo

y me hizo abrazar el cuello de mi tío Robert

como si no hubiera sabido que él se iría en dos horas

como si no hubiera aprendido algo acerca de la gente

y su desvanecimiento.

La última vez que la vi, ella no pudo verme

enredó su capucha cubriendo su rostro

y caminó dentro de la zanja

como si hubiera cosas que incluso ella no diría

como si nunca hubiera sabido su suciedad y polvo,

después de todo

la tierra se hunde y los gusanos la reparten.

Help Me to Salt, Help Me to Sorrow

(fragment)

No, it’s 1969–

The year my mother becomes a wax paste,

or so she looks to the child I was,

and she drips into the pink satin

and I learned the funereal smell of carnations.

That year the moon was still made of green cheese.

That year men first bagged and labeled that moon.

There are no years, only the past

and I still don’t know why Odell Horne

pulled a shotgun on my brother

or how the body contains so much blood.

I still don’t know why Donna Hill went to Myrtle Beach

and three days later came back dead.

For ten years I lived with Louise Stegall,

the lover of my father, one of her four men, all buried–

suicide, murder, drink, again murder.

It was after the second one that she sat stock still

and silent, four years in the asylum.

Now she walks the road all day,

picking up Cracker Jack trinkets

to give to children

brave enough to approach her.

When I was nine, the starling pecked outside her window a whole week.

Somebody’s gonna die, she said

and made me hug Uncle Robert’s neck

as if I couldn’t know he’d be gone in two hours,

as if I hadn’t learned anything about people

and their vanishing.

The last time I saw her she wouldn’t look at me,

jerked her sweatshirt’s hood across

her face and stepped into the ditch,

as though there are some things even she won’t tell,

as though I’ve never known it’s dirt and dust after all–

the earth’s sink and the worms’ castings.

Prologue

In winter’s spider-eyed light strung through steam grates, the tunnels turn feral.

This is the other city, the dark one

of hidden passages, runaways and orphaned days

and like me it sleeps in broken buildings

and smells of a sad suicide from the fifteenth century, and like me

it has smoked three things on the mold-furred walls

which are the only altars 

of those who’ve dropped through holes in the sidewalk

to descend to these steam tunnels rung by slick rung.

This city shambles room to room.

Drawn to the easy sound of sleep,

it knows the pattern night pens on tender skin,

knows your darkest secrets and tells

no one except the sycamore

which rips from its skin with shame.

It wants absolution,

taps your sins on water pipes to shudder out of faucets,

ties them to the tail feathers of soot-mottled birds

who beat up from the concrete-lipped curb,

falter over cars, stutter

then catch an oily gust and wheel into the scalded sky.

It claims to be blind though it might have a thousand eyes,

screams obscenities from 13th and University and pisses in alleys.

Sometimes it drinks too much. Sometimes it begs for more.

It hides tents among trees in the park by the sluggish river

this red-eyed thing blinking from storm grates.

It is a window breaking.

Other people’s blood in its veins, skin on fire,

smack, crack, meth, strychnine and scouring powder sold as speed,

some drug or another telling it die, you must die. But it doesn’t die.

Step around it on your way to the theater.

It crawls through your bedroom window, a warm bed and in the morning

the smell of coffee and bacon spitting in grease. That’s all it wants.

Aching hands in underwear drawers,

snagged silks.

You are its worst nightmare.

Coiled cable, blood and razor-wire, shredded muscle and blue bone,

cold nights, the city under the city

is where you’ll find me. Though not now.

Now it is heat-hazed summer and sunset

and I whisper the four-syllable name of the stranger

I should have become and disappear through the back door 

of the Villa Inn where the cook paces the few feet

between the makeline and the ovens

muttering Chimbukee     Chimbukee     Chimbukee

It’s been nine years since he’s known the burned light

of his own country or a woman’s name churned in sea foam, nine years

since he’s clung to flesh which smells of rosemary and dried tomatoes.

He checks his billfold, thick with this week’s pay. Let’s go

he says to me, pointing toward his apartment across the alley.

Let’s go Super Ju. Party. Party, he says

then reaches his swollen hands deep into his pants

past the flour-grubbed belt line 

and with a hard twist adjusts his truss.

We call him Chris though that’s not his name

and I think to myself, Homer, Odysseus,

the blood-blue sea, the sun in its relentless veracity

be damned to hell and back. Sweating pizza drivers, me sleeping

in my truck or if it’s winter in empty buildings and the steam tunnels,

and every weekend the parking lot filling up with dope dealers

with their out-of-state plates

and hookers dropped off by their pimps

and the homeless who stumble

from the boarded buildings and doorways to this oiled kaleidoscope

under the warehouses’ dark windows—

the broken, fish-line-strung and eye-level hooked—

this grease-barrel and sour dumpster-stinking,

trash-can-blaze, busted bottles, pissed on pissed off

fuck you fuck you kill strong-armed ambulance scream, parking lot

and Chris saying Chimbukee     Chimbukee     Chimbukee

cussing us, Scata. Malaka American. Sto dyavolo malaka,

Pizza malaka. Deliver,Chris yells but slow night

no orders, no tips so we yell back, You malaka. 

Give us pizzas. To krima sto lemo sou,Chris says

Greek which to us means nothing.

and just outside the fish-net stockinged, stiletto-heeled

Star, Joy, Princess. Joy, I think, and am too tired to think anything else

when she tells me she swings, asks if I have something,

anything, coke, smack, speed, rock. At least some pot. Come on. Hook me up, she says.

Then the teams. Salt & Sugar. Salt & Pepper. Nilla & Chocolate

with their matching tattoos, Comedy & Tragedy. Happy one day, Dead the next.

          Angel, Love Boat, Crystal.

          I got first degree      I got MG

          Blue ludes, 8-Balls, rocks, the dealers yell.

          Quiver & Shiver     Come 

          get my stash        I got the stuff          

          Tongo & Cash

Lot of Candy Man & Sweet Stuff.

Slick the Stick, a pimp caught up in his own rhyme.

Lover Boy & Philly Boy. Wanna-be’s and gonna-be’s: 

.