Creed

Meet with the Gray Citizen

The Wizard and the Mechanics

Cardenal

Creed
Man in the center of the city
among people and stones;
pass by with my flower
writing poems on pages of ash.

Meet with the Gray Citizen
     -For Carlos Alfonso-

I've met with the gray citizen.

He was looking through the bus window and i've seen him
like the image of a chicken moving over garbage places
kicking flowers and fragments of glass.

Only like this, opaque.
His voice slid inside my brain
like water with no shine or taste:
muddled being of a color much similar to gray.
My steps going to meet him.
Dark afternoon: shadow's cloth above us.
This character and i coincided on the street's length.
No light was shining.
The bleary look of such a man
(i guess one with a certain pain)
skidded just a moment over me
like someone reflecting up
a quicksilverless mirror.

The Wizard and the Mechanics
The wizard and the mechanics
go out in silence for a drink;
sit in the deep of the tavern
and they talk about our daily things;
spinning axle trees, the workshop roar,
engines made up piecemeal
that finally move on their own effort.
Describe later the television hours,
night and its blankets, wife, the children's fear.
Mechanics talk, the wizard shuts his mouth:
feels jealousy for these common men;
would like to quit his craft outdated,
to trade the art of turning mice into flowers,
oranges into knives,
an art with so much effort apprehended,
for a pair of greasy overalls,
a place among machines and axle tross
where endlessly black steel wheels turn and turn.

Cardenal

For Helio Orovio

One night in the Colony Hotel, speaking with Ernesto Cardenal,
leaning over his beard,
as if over a white abyss,
i heard him say:
your poems have that pessimism
of he who forgets the existence of God
or doubts about the heart of men.
It was the sound of his words
like the rumor of birds' wings,
or the stroke of oars on the sea.
I felt the flapping of fear on my temples
and wanted to listen to Vivaldi
or contemplate a flower bunch
and i headed back to Nueva Gerona;
the highway like a black creek,
taking me closer to a building painted in green,
to a cup full of beer to the brim,
to a bed made with yellow sheets.

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