Three Poems by Raúl Rivero

Three Poems by Raúl Rivero

What are these gentlemen looking for
in my house?

What is this officer doing
reading the sheet of paper
on which I’ve written
the words “ambition,” “lightness,” and “brittle”?

What hint of conspiracy
speaks to him from the photo without a dedication
of my father in a guayabera (black tie)
in the fields of the National Capitol?

How does he interpret my certificates of divorce?

Where will his techniques of harassment lead him
when he reads the ten-line poems
and discovers the war wounds
of my great-grandfather?

Eight policemen
are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,
and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks
and want to know where little Andrea sleeps
and what does her asthma have to do
with my carpets.

They want the code of a message from Zucu
in the upper part
of a cryptic text (here a light triumphal smile
of the comrade):
“Castles with music box. I won’t let the boy
hang out with the boogeyman. Jennie.”

A specialist in aporia came,
a literary critic with the rank of interim corporal
who examined at the point of a gun
the hills of poetry books.

Eight policemen
in my house
with a search order,
a clean operation,
a full victory
for the vanguard of the proletariat
who confiscated my Consul typewriter,
one hundred forty-two blank pages
and a sad and personal heap of papers
–the most perishable of the perishable
from this summer.

Don’t try to prohibit my nostalgia
Don’t decree that this internal pain is subversive.

Let me go on dreaming that I didn’t go
Just as right now I’m dreaming that I went.

Allow the free flow of delirium
The coming and going of the spirit.

Don’t let yourselves be seduced by papers
nobody is going to traffic with dreams.

Sincere phantasms don’t use jewels.
Dogs don’t perceive images.

Suffering doesn’t appear on the flat
and gray X-ray screens.

Your special agents
do they figure out metaphors?

Susanna has sent me from the south
an almanac
so that I
will finally
learn to grow old.

As it is blue
I look at it
but Mama is the one
who tears open the pages of the days.

It’s a good present
because it marks
the seasons as well
and thus one knows
exactly when the time has come to dress warmly.

Thus one goes out
prudently in the spring
knowing not ...