The Spectacle, and: Translation
- The Spectacle, and: Translation
The Spectacle
A man and his daughterwash up on the river mouth.The man envelopes the daughterwith his uniform.Even nullified he understandsspectacle: together, in repose,they form a whelk.
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A complete deck of bonescrammed into a pursemarkets the purse.The bones are namelessand therefore without price.Unless coupled with the purse.Unless the purse rejects a hexlike girasol or milagros.
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On a path through the border’s hairlinea little boy has no name.Not metalmark.Not nutria.Not cyclops.Handcuffed, he is transmutedinto an object of care.Beaten, an object of indignation.Yet still an object.
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Objects can be stacked like cordwoodinto a hot rig.Assigned a single bottle of waterand a corner for relief. [End Page 131]
The door of the rig makes magic:one moment, nothing.The next, a taxidermist’s shop.
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Some nameless objects becomepriceless in death.Death follows and is also marketable.A logotype designed by refugeessells in clenched teeth.The shirt that signals virtuesold cheap at the rosary.The price of a man wrappinga shirt around his daughter: her sound her shape her diminishing size. [End Page 132]
Translation
You try to teach me a wordthat can only be properly spokenin your native language:it means barb, the precipitous dropof a scorpion’s sting.I learn it only becauseyou leave me.
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Later, I dismantle youin a language not my own.Your trauma becomes illegible.If there is anything you’ve taught meit is how compassion is uncommonto tongues.
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The more you share the nameof everything that can be namedthe more identical you becomewith the named.
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Right now, doing nothing elsebut beingyou are apocalypse.As I am.As are the countless stars.But at least they pulsefor each other.We understand nothing.
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The girl who drownedis a glyph. [End Page 133]
Also, a thornthat carvesa little of its slender impudenceinto speech.
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What would we gainif we knewthe various intonations of the riverthat swallowed her?Could we have saved her,dragged her body from the waterlike a guiro bentbeyond repair?
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We believed that lovecould be our translation device.We were wrong.It lacks an instruction manual.
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You say: it is thundering.I say: there is something about youthat scares me.You say: close the gate.I hear: the suffering of the worlddoesn’t matter to me.
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Every time you open your mouthto speaka finch flits byand steals your gift. [End Page 134]
Rodney Gomez is the author of Citizens of the Mausoleum (Sundress Publications, 2018), a finalist for the John A. Robertson Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; Ceremony of Sand (YesYes Books, 2019); Arsenal with Praise Song (Orison Books, 2020); and Geographic Tongue (Pleiades Press, 2020), winner of the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series. His work appears in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, Verse Daily, and other journals. He is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop.
