tempo, and: small alphabets, and: hand work
- tempo, and: small alphabets, and: hand work
tempo
the leap is shortthe child's white instantor the snow'sso the mill horseknows his dark turninghas no endlike pain that lingerson gauze for daystime bends and compressesyou do not tell the windto avoid corners or high wallsdesperation is uselesseven the pounding goes unheardI saw you fallmy eye met the momentbrief even comparedto the shortest life
a stem breaksripe fruit lies softlywhen it separatesthe world ends [End Page 43]
small alphabets
marks of invisible alphabetsremain on my skinblurry letters in english mistakes in spanishand all the street noise scribbledin small black notes inside the labyrinth of my earwhere I live between two sounds
one is home the other is possibility
the warmth inside finds small doorsand the silence of my father's backsays sleep so all the words I knowand know twicecan fall forgotten like yesterday's rain [End Page 44]
hand work
my hands want things to mold and changeadd to or forgetwet clay to knead and a loomfor the threads to lie on
if pain could be scraped awayor pulled out in strings one by onelooking for greater lightnesswatching what I do not wantas it falls to the floor
how much clay makes a bowlone thousand threads on the loomthe rest is heaped upon uslike the earth mounds of the dead [End Page 45]
Gloria García Lorca was born in New York City, where she lived for twenty years during her family's exile after the Spanish Civil War. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and then moved to Madrid where she now lives and works as a visual artist, poet, and translator. She has co-translated, with the poet Jane Durán, Federico García Lorca's The Gypsy Ballads (Enitharmon Press, 2011), The Tamarit Divan, and The Sonnets of Dark Love (both Enitharmon Press, 2017). The three poems in this issue of NER are from a bilingual collection called The Hudson Poems, written in the author's two "mother" tongues.
