MEKEEL McBRIDE [19.003]

Mekeel McBride

Mekeel McBride. Poeta de EE.UU.

Mekeel McBride es autora de seis libros de poemas, profesora de inglés en la Universidad de New Hampshire. Ha recibido dos becas NEA.

CALDERO

Una vieja se cansa de su rostro triste

así que llena su tazón de sopa con agua fresca

y mira entonces el pequeño lago hasta que ve

su reflejo flotar allí pero suavizado.

Sonríe, y cuando lo hace,

su tristeza se tropieza en el tazón,

con la sorpresa de verse por fin aligerada un poco.

Luego lleva el tazón a lo alto en la maleza

y lo deja allí para que las lenguas ásperas

de los gatos callejeros lo rasguñen;

para que la luz de las estrellas se repare en él.

Ahora bien, quién sabe si ella es vieja,

o joven, esta mujer que conjura la desesperanza.

Que ríe cuando pela las pieles arrugadas

de las patatas rosadas, las echa luna

a luna en el caldero de la noche: nueva sopa de raíces.

KETTLE

An old woman gets tired of her sad face

so she fills her soup bowl with fresh water

then stares into that small lake until she sees

her reflection floating there but softened.

She smiles and when she does that,

her sadness gets tricked into the bowl,

surprised to be lightened a little at last.

Then she takes that bowl into high grass

and leaves it there for the rough thongues

of homeless cats to scratch across;

for starligth to men itself in.

Now, who knows whether she is old

or young, this woman who tricks away despair.

She's laughing as she peels the wrinkled skins

from red potatoes, drooping them moon

by moon into evening's keetle: new root soup.

Líneas conectadas, Nueva Poesía de los Estados Unidos,

Sarabande Books, 2006 / Editado por April Lindner

Traducción de Zulai Marcela Fuentes

Friend Blue Snake

Light, far away, faltering like a votive at the feet of a blue saint 

who blesses only the most lost of causes. 

The man and woman on a dark path walk home wordlessly 

as if it were an ordinary evening.

But it is the time of the moon fat with maggots; no pearls! 

no pearls! sticky shellac-light calls, falling. 

The time of the starving underground animals up for a feed. 

Time of the masks of sequins cut from the dresses of old dolls,

sewn onto human skin. Something only as evident 

as wind is tracking the humans. Tree-top leaves, 

under its weight, treble and click 

trying to rid themselves of its sour body.

Allowed any power but to touch the earth, what it wants 

is everything—the books 

in the man's bag, pages black and rich as loam, 

secrets written there roots teach the burrowers:

vole, five-hearted earthworm and mouse 

who carries the entire meadow underground 

in memory every time it descends 

into the fragrant dark: bone, seed, star, stone.

Wants the hourglass the woman uses to measure time; sand 

she allowed to slip back to sea, then made another kind 

of ocean in the emptiness. Pollen and saifron 

now sifting back and forth in the glass house no bigger than an egg.

It wants the bees that float behind them night and day 

in disorderly, obedient veils, whispering what 

has been translated 

from lost libraries hidden deep in living flowers.

This shudder through dying leaves, this animal of string 

and rotten meat, this beast 

who dips its tongue in corpse entrails delicately 

as a hummingbird might feed at a fuchsia bloom 

wants to swallow the man and woman

walking home whole: hangnail, finger clipping, heartbeat, soul. 

Says so in a sound like a child's flute, oasis, mesmerizing, 

go to sleep now, it is safe, look,

the ocean, sea glass white and blue tumbling into gems at the edge;

take off your heavy coat, abandon yourself to the azure palace 

of god's first water. Bells in the distance, goat bells, bells 

braided into the shaggy manes of old ponies,

wind chimes chanting away in gold laughter the hungry ghosts. 

But behind it all, the man and the woman hear the whistle, 

decades old, of the death camp trains. Dust falling 

through still air. They hear and turn to each other,

baring the truth of it between them in one look—book of fire, 

then they fall to the ground in one body, 

blue snake, 

every part of that body touching earth, swum forward by earth;

first light, faraway light, a library older than Alexandria 

cool stone corridors welcome blue snake in as desert welcomes 

water 

and because of this, the child tortured then slaughtered, 

left stinking at the side of the road is now carried

into the green breath of the meadow of the oldest story 

and is rinsed there and restored; where tears 

on the cheeks of the late night reader leave no scars, only a slight 

trace of pollen and the black pages of the night books burn with aurora 

borealis.

Some Kisses for Bill

A shooting star-that spine of light- 

sudden in darkness. The lost child starting 

its search for the body grief robbed it of. This kiss, 

the abandoned body 

returned whole.

*

A kiss as gold and clumsy and glad 

as the way tubas 

woo wind through Sousa marches.

*

Rivers spangled with the mystery 

every explorer has bequeathed to deep water.

*

Blissful as a statue's secret gulping of meteors 

the moment after the preoccupied human 

has passed.

*

A kiss like the names carved 

on an old gravestone, filled in with moss. 

From loss, summer 

starting its green territories again.

*

Blue-grey of a heron folding itself 

into the monastery of the estuary; this kiss, how it feels 

to have its solitude fill your body 

with love from the necessary 

invisible ocean.

*

Kisses that touch you the way the symphony 

conductor's hands make love 

to music's body.

*

A kiss that loves you the way a telescope loves starlight.

*

Kiss for the part of you hopeless 

as the suicide who steps off the bridge into an abyss 

that fills quickly with the flat slam of water 

black as your father's anger. No choice 

but to give in to this. The letting go. The failing. 

Then something small, impossible begins 

to happen, just enough wing to hold you. This kiss 

opening.

*

After talking to a woman you once loved, 

who did not, I think, love you, you found a rock 

in a shopping center parking lot. 

“It had been run over a lot,” you said. “It didn't want 

to be run over anymore.”

And you took the stone to a small stream 

where water in one long kiss covered it and kept 

kissing. This is for you, all these kisses 

that know how the stone is just water that stopped itself 

in order to survive. That know how it feels 

to take the unbearable weight 

of such heavy machinery bearing down over and over. 

Then nothing.

A kiss 

like the water you put that stone in, water 

that is a kind of weeping, not just for the loss 

of the woman, whoever she was, but for all of it, 

for what was unspeakable. 

Water like love that doesn't change 

the stone, wear it down or carry it away. Just touches it. 

That's all. Touches it.

Jimmy, Jesus and the Japanese Beetles

The five kids, their parents, the grandmother 

and Jesus sit down to dinner. Pink, dry flakes 

of canned salmon lie on the plastic plates 

like eczema. New burns, from the day's ironing 

rise like small roses on the grandmother's wrists. 

Because they have never seen Jesus eat, they've stopped 

setting his place. He always wears the same outfit, 

the one showing his heart all wrapped in barbed wire. 

Jimmy, who has just turned eleven thinks it looks 

like liver wrapped in bacon and says so. 

His father slaps him across the face then sends him 

out to the darkest part of the yard to say Hail Marys 

and Our Fathers. Sometimes all he has to do is ask 

for the bread. Or decorate his mashed potatoes with peas. 

And he's smacked, shoved off into the dark, 

to undergo penance, he's come to think, for hunger itself. 

He doesn't mind the yard though. Tonight it's quiet. 

Once in awhile a stray dog runs down the alley. 

By street lamp light he notices that Japanese beetles 

have nearly chewed away the leaves of his mother's roses 

and that greenery all gone to rotten lace fills him again 

with a desperate, small sadness. He will not be allowed 

back in to finish his dinner. He thinks of Jesus, 

his beautiful long brown hair, his kind eyes, 

his body that is a body. And Jimmy wonders 

if the point isn't that Jesus has come to the table 

every night wanting someone to remove the thorns 

from his heart and offer him a full plate 

of lamb chops, gravy, peas and potatoes. 

Wanting someone to see him for who he really is. 

And then Jimmy slips his thin hand into his pants 

and touches himself and that pleasure is the only prayer 

he has to offer because for a little while, he is really there, 

like Jesus with a healed heart, like small weeds 

trying to fill the empty yard with any kind of green.

.