A man born
among
multitudes,
I lived among multitudes
living-
no matter for history:
it is land,
the heartland of Chile that matters, where
green hair grows dense in the vineyards,
the grape lives on light
and under the feet of a people, wine is born.
Parral is the name
for
what winter brought forth.
The house and the street
no longer stand.
The mountain untethered
its horses,
power
massed
in the depths,
the ranges kicked
upward
and a village fell
gutted
by earthquake.
The mud walls, the portraits nailed to the walls,
the tatterdemalion furniture
in shadowy parlors,
the silence crosscut by the flies,
sank back
into dust: we are
only a handful keeping
semblance and kinship together,
a mere handful, and the wine.
The wine went on living:
it climbed up the
grapes
that a vagabond
autumn had scattered,
it sank in the wine presses,
loading the hogsheads
and staining them smooth with its blood; alive
in its dread
of that terrible earth,
naked and vital, it thrived.
I remember nothing
of weather or countryside,
faces or figures-just dust,
impalpable dust,
a tag end of summer,
a graveyard
where once I was brought
to search in the gravestones
for the sleep of my mother.
Her face
was unknown to me,
so I called to her, hoping to summon her face from the dead;
but she stayed with the buried ones,
she knew nothing, heard nothing, answered nothing at all,
keeping her distance, apart from her son,
elusive and shy
in the dark.
That’s where I come from:
a quake-ridden soil, from Parral,
a land loaded with grapes
springing up
from the death of my mother.
~
From "A New Decade Poems 1958-1967"
20 июн 2024
