Shoots, and: Searching for Another Depth
Rent from DeepDyve- Shoots, and: Searching for Another Depth
Shoots
From Fatigas tropicales
Tree, sprouts. Air, sprouts. Light, sprouts. I have pulleda cluster from my left eye. I rise and eat from curdled fruitsthat taste like Island. I fell the word Island and make a tableto organize my family and exercise the memory of my dead.Flesh, live again. Let crows feed upon youand regain their sight. Everything sprouts from a hermetic throat,from a hermetic poem and from a soul no longer growing old.Eternity, we aren’t talking about you. We aren’t talking!Everything sprouts when ants breathe on wood, imitating us,and birds dream of sky. Everything sprouts withina current of silence where you swim at the bottom.In a single life we accumulate another.In a single agony we accumulate another.
Searching for Another Depth
Certain animals whose souls vibrate ever farther from my handshave broken through asphalt searching for water, echoesthat can explain how to live when fruit tasteslike gunpowder and metal, independence and tyranny.
Certain animals pierce the surface with crude instrumentsand let water corrode inside the body (always, inside)bringing more drought to the anthill and to the bloodthat names nothing now. [End Page 28] Souls vibrate—even when they don’t know it—and hidein tiny rooms to contemplate the quicklime rushthat has lasted so long.
The animals’ hands will lose their memorylike certain interior spaces that have been touchedby the hurricane’s eye, by high and low pressurenothing can resuscitate now in the human heart.
Crack, in the far wall. Far wall, dawn comesfiltering between one respiratory system and another,between souls that descend from branchesto seeds, between a drop of water and its desire.
Country, we must dig ever deeper searching for Country. [End Page 29]
Leymen Pérez (Matanzas, Cuba, 1976) is a poet, editor, and cultural promoter. Among his poetry titles are Tallador de ruidos, Transiciones, Corrientes coloniales, Los altos reinos, and, most recently, Fatigas del trópico.
Margaret Randall is a poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, photographer, and social activist. Randall’s recent titles include five books of poetry, most recently About Little Charlie Lindberg (Wings), and two books of scholarship, most recently Haydee Santamaria, Cuban Revolutionary: She Led by Transgression (Duke up). She lives in New Mexico with her partner of twenty-eight years, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels extensively to read, lecture, and teach.
