Like Ships in the Night

And the cripple? In what air did he leave
his leg? In what shoe will he return,
stringing holes, eddies of emptiness
that once were flesh, bones, membranes,
a dancing foot.
I hear the tapping of the hours that drip
into the ear of the world.
Also a unanimous stampede flinging up stones,
the dwarfs.
Everyone has a part in the chorus.
People fill their mouths with spaghetti,
and put on the masks--federicos
I step into the void and a window occurs.
Jaws leap up out there, snapping,
crippling the sanctifying word.
Pregnant bellies pointing toward the temple,
toward the funeral home,
are comforting.
Does anybody look in the direction
of the sun, the visionary sun
of the blind?
What is glimpsed transmigrates, materializes
in streets and alleyways.
Vision, trolling among swift stars,
catches and reels in
beautiful port cities, soaring arcs of blue.
My wife expels my body,
her lesbian vomits forth. Something smells
black and very foul.
Poetry: a line perpendicular to the yawn
of the traffic cop.

Translated by JoAnne Engelbert

Alexis Gómez Rosa was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1950. He studied at the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Since 1985 he has lived in New York, where he received his masters degree in literature at SUNY in 1988. He has published the following chapbooks: Oficio de post-muerto (1973), Pluróscopo (1977), High Quality, Ltd. (1985), and Contra la pluma la espuma (1990). These last two were part of a poetry collection, Luna Cabeza Caliente (1981). Recently, the publishing house Lluvia of Lima, Perú, published an anthology of his work under the title Tiza y Tinta. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in hispanic literature at New York University.

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