"She outside the light outside the world..."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
translated from the Spanish by Brett Alan Sanders
Risks
She exposes herself to the noises of the empty house. She runs her risk and waits for the humming of the refrigerator to propel the rooms as far as the doors of a garden that does not belong to life. She waits for the blades of the fan to slowly pierce the ceilings, ascending dimensions that are unaware of the rhythm of crying.
She begins to twirl, again and again, the same song of Freddie Mercury where in the voice of an angel the face of all the missing shows through.
_______________________________________________________________ Sorrow
The man has a great sorrow, domesticated like an animal, robust. It is clumsy, its hair covers its eyes, and it can scarcely look into the distance. On winter nights it sits with the man next to the fire. He protects it, encourages it, does not let it die because for him the sorrow becomes mixed up with his very life.
In the morning he opens the door to the world for it and it runs through implacable streets, face to the wind, extreme and dark in a desire that does not know its object.
_______________________________________________________________ Weavings
The morning builds itself with color. A speck of macerated dust in the bowl of light is with its small torch illuminating the rooms of the house.
But the woman in the doorway has begun a weaving in the reverse of day. She weaves the voice of her dead father and the silent shadow of those who have not been born; she weaves her own name as it was pronounced before Time, weaves the land where morning will sleep, the rose of night that razes the colors in its dark advent.
_______________________________________________________________ Utter Silence
She would sing in utter silence, sing in dreams, wrapped up in the
words that the dreams lent like dark gloves.
Every night she would start the same song all over again: clumsy steps,
eyes asleep; violent tossing against the wind by the outside light.
She outside the light outside the world, she homeless, with only a
glove to squeeze throats of muteness. She seated on the shore of her
song, like the fisherman over empty water.
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Brett Alan Sanders is a writer, translator, and teacher living in Tell City, Indiana. His own short prose has appeared in print and online, most recently in New Works Review. His novella A Bride Called Freedom was published in November of 2003 in a bilingual edition (English text with Spanish translation by Sebastián R. Bekes) from Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, an online publisher of print-on-demand literature and academic studies in Spanish, English, and bilingual editions (www.editorial-ene.com). He is at work on the translation of Lojo's most acclaimed novel, La pasión de los nómades (The Passion of Nomads), and aside from the prose poems has translated a couple of her short stories.