Martín Cerisola

Sin título


1.
Es allí, desde el fuego.
Desde la incandescente herida de la luz donde arden los nacientes, y lo puro es mezcla, y las llamas son nunca las mismas, y son el viento en ellas y son también lo que devoran, lo que reducen a ceniza.

Como lo rojo del alba, el fuego consume los huesos de lo que va a nacer de otra manera.

2.
Un fantasma.
Una voz que no se oye.
Alguien
como bailando en otro mundo
me visita,
me deja.
Su estela se hunde más allá de lo posible.
Roja.
Como la marca de una quemadura.

3.
La vida está despierta.
La vida se abre.
Cada vez.
Invita.

Y en silencio, sin que nadie lo advierta, el amor sucede.
Se cumple.

No hay nada más vivo que la vida secreta.

4.
Baila para salir de su enfermedad de fijeza en el blanco.
Para sentir las manos vacías y estar vivo.
Porque no hay palabra más encendida que la que todavía no sabe.
La que vivir le regala.

5.
Soltar la hermosura.
Como si fuera sin límites hacia el mar de la garganta.
Metal. Canción. Cardumen.

Esa herida. Es niña.

No dejes que la cicatriz la alcance.

No la mires.

6.
Escribir.
Soltar, como una boca de pájaros, el bosque, con su ruido de lluvia
y copas sacudidas por el viento.

trans. Keith Ekiss

Untitled


1.
It’s there—in the fire.
In the radiant wound of light where newborns burn and what’s pure is mixed and where the flames are never the same; they are the wind inside and what the wind devours, what is reduced to ashes.

As the red of dawn, the fire consumed the bones of what would be born another way.

2.
A ghost.
An unheard voice.
Someone
like dancing in another world
visits me,
leaves me.
Its wake sinks further than what’s possible.
Red.
Like the mark of a burn.

3.
Life is wide awake.
Life opens.
Each time.
Inviting.

And quietly, without anyone noticing, love happens.
Fulfilled.

Nothing’s more alive than the secret life.

4.
Dance to leave your sick fixation in the white.
To feel your hands empty and alive.
Because there is no brighter word than one as yet unknown.
One that gives life.

5.
Release beauty.
As if it were unbounded toward the throat’s sea.
Metal. Song. Shoal.

That wound. It's a girl.

Don’t let the scar surround you.

Don’t look.

6.
To write.
To release, like a mouth of birds, the woods, with their noise of rain
and crowns shaken by the wind.

 
 

Martín Cerisola was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1979. He is the author of a book of essays, Orfismo y errancia, and a poetry collection, Perseguir.

Keith Ekiss is a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford University and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. He is the author of Pima Road Notebook (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2010) and translator of The Fire’s Journey (Tavern Books, 2013/2015), an epic poem by the Costa Rican writer Eunice Odio in four volumes. Territory of Dawn: The Selected Poems of Eunice Odio was published in Spring 2016 by The Bitter Oleander Press. His translations of Martín Cerisola appear in America Invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets (University of New Mexico Press, 2016), edited by Jesse Lee Kercheval.

 
 

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