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Some Poems by Manuel Rivas

SERPENT WITH WINGS

The moonlight’s brotherly voice in the sacred night

Georg Trakl

Nearby, the serpent, the breath.

The fire’s coldness in the yellow wheat-fields.

Nearby, the rainbow, the returning rivers.

The samurai in the clearing.

The sword’s vertigo.

A rose window shattered in artificial festivities.

And from the earth’s core

the song of insects.

A man in the clearing,

under the moon.

Between autumn’s breasts,

on the lagoons.

Down below,

in the tile-works’ forgotten grottoes.

In the eel’s electric eyes.

A little owl sieves the moon

in silence.

The smallest star, there, in the clearing,

tear on the sword’s blade.

The nails of boars

in the tunnels of moles.

In the rock crystals,

by the golden hair,

by the gods.

There’s a man there, in the clearing,

on the sword’s tragic blade,

like the first day.

And a serpent with a seagull’s wings.

Serpent

with

a

seagull’s

wings.

The goldfinch’s emerald psalm

– hey, you, sun, amen!

The dawn.

The seagull beats on the blind seas.

In the wood’s ferns, the serpent sleeps.

BALLAD ON THE WESTERN BEACHES

The ship settles on the shore

and land birds nest on its mast.

With the compass I trace routes on maps of tillage,

hurt by the sky’s anger on the seed’s weak ribs,

fearful of the flower’s drift before inhumane winds.

The ship sleeps on the shore,

the keel’s blue imagination covered in brush and rushes,

and the figurehead has a strolling soul.

In the binnacle is kept the book of moons and the rains’ needle,

a bottle of old snow liqueur.

A skylark sings on a rusty harpoon,

a blackbird’s sigh lashes the cables

and crows on the rudder glimpse lesser death lying alongside.

All set, admiral, for the great journey.

JOSHUA SLOCUM’S TRIP ROUND THE WORLD

Captain Joshua Slocum built The Spray on top of an old cemetery. When he put in place the sloop’s timbers, the apple trees were in blossom. In the Nova Scotia summer, cherries fell on The Spray’s belly. In winter, the whalers warmed their hands in Joshua’s workshop and talked to him of the Arctic, the ice candles on their beards and the burst of spit as it left the mouth like a frozen matchstick. He travelled solo round the world to forget a great love.

         Land, from The Spray, was just a graveyard.

BLUES

Only the night is paradise: men sleep.

Dreams open the windows

and lick their wounds on beaches and riversides.

Dreams sing with frozen throat.

Like slaves, they beat the drums.

THE BLACK EARTH

If I speak, I will speak to the earth.

The real earth,

the black earth

where the root takes.

The earth that is trodden on.

The earth that is burnt and nailed.

That huge canvas where man draws his caprice.

Where man is lost and writhes in shadows.

The black earth,

that body of an old whore with tobacco-stained teeth

and bags so blue they’re black.

If I speak, I will speak only to her

and I’ll speak with my hands,

gently with my nails,

with a lover’s passion,

the way wounded boars speak when they glimpse death.

If I speak, I will speak to the earth.

To the earth, that black earth

that spits up springs like blood.

BEIRUT

Attic in Coruña,

a home at last,

atop an old mast

on the bay’s rebellious suit,

with books, the odd picture, a fern, the bird

and the Paul Gonsalves saxophone.

The boy has gone to sleep,

his arms sticking out.

With the din of a nostalgic machine,

they have collected the rubbish in the street.

That distant dog will bark all night.

Hold me like this,

very tight, so I don’t feel.

What’s left to fall in Beirut?

LETTER TO A SON

The father’s voice has the sound

of a coin on the ground.

Do not inherit his silences,

his diplomatic weakness,

his cowardly cynicism,

his defeat.

Conquer me.

Beat me.

Run so far I cannot see you.

Leave no trace.

Forget me.

And then, if you’ve guts,

with knitted brow:

love me.

ARZÚA: SNOWFALL OF ’87

The world grows old

and it snows.

Black hearts caw

and time pants like a frozen schoolchild.

Time waits by a roadside,

its hands in its pockets

and a heavy skeleton under its arm.

Time has the eyes of a cow.

Time holds the hand of a pregnant woman

in red socks.

The world’s eyelids droop.

Wounded flakes settle on its lips.

The hearts howl on the ridge.

Time,

time shelters by the fire,

closes its eyes

and dreams it’s over.

The hearts whinny on the icy hills.

The world has cold feet.

Eyes burn in the salty silence.

The hearts cough,

are scared off.

Time escapes on their yellow beak.

HUNTING

That morning, the hunting party were a happy babble

in the whitened silence of the woods.

The men were passing round the bottle and the dogs snapping at the air.

They cleared a way through gigantic ferns,

swept aside tender forests,

quickened their breath in the short cuts,

and a false trail carried them off in the evening.

Those woods were deserted,

burnt to the core.

Tired and ill at ease,

they returned, scratched by the shadows.

One of them fired into the sky. Then they all did.

TENDERNESS

Seeing man on his own,

weary,

his hoofs in the snow,

ermined in stars,

howling towards the infinite.

ONE SEVENTEEN

The fascination of things in the hands. Things have life in the hands. The age of the nut. Knives, gigantic ridges of imps. The wooden mallet, a dull thud that opens the nut and out comes winter’s cerebrum, the snowman’s brains. Night’s street-lights on the wet roads, the moon’s clove of garlic, throw-back of the sun now shining on Borneo. The hands turn the dial. Short-wave band 5 at 23:15, Radio Moscow International talks about the Russian Orthodox patriarch and an avalanche of snow in the Urals. An avalanche is too big for the hands. The cerebrum directs the hands, the hands grasp things, things seduce the hands, the hands stroke the cerebrum’s moss and navelwort. Two men were working in the new cemetery. What do you feel when you build a cemetery? They seemed happy enough when I looked. Then it started to rain and they each got in a niche. At The Voice of Galicia’s offices in Carballo, Ameixeiras introduced me to a hunter. He was a young, blond boy with acne. He told me he had seen a heron and not fired. The trigger tickling the fingers. The eyes following the heron’s grey and crested whiteness. The yellow beak pecking at the snow’s brains. Letting it go, that coup de grâce. I turn the dial. Music of dervishes. Just three dance steps to the window and I open the plates of the Book of Heaven.

Translated from Galician by Jonathan Dunne

Manuel Rivas’ poems have appeared in Absinthe, Modern Poetry in Translation and Poetry Wales.

Anthology publication date: Mar 2009. Order this book in English.

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