GUILLERMO PARRA

Kid A

You will not write the honest
version of your life
So, the rain makes concert
after crickets and frogs
Among the double-loops
of time worn through
The arches of what boulevards
disintegrate hereafter
Kid A on the bus speakers
This sunlight, antique
Twenty seconds, a verse
Across the breadth of
what ill images held
My resort to symbolism
The mere sound of this
I walk alone for what
months and days merged
Those same streets
of el centro de Caracas
that Ramos Sucre covered
at night to divert insomnia
In black on benches
or naming the corners
Translating and editing
the subway afternoon
A quick digest of what
flower minds my love
Be such sorrow as only I
know how to feed or draw
These situations exist
beside average forms
Magic dust debriefed
This night makes choral ice

Mérida

Written on air
Infinitely focused
The homeless
traffic controller
Debts inclined
For pressure
To those fine points
The weight or worth
of whose book
A shuffle
Continuously interrupts
The plains flooded
at the delta’s retreat
Mountains emerge
from the fog – angular
A dream-wolf’s yellow
eyes and giant growl
This singer’s fingers
Golden gown of trees
Mist procures the drops
After horses have
suffered what chapters
Whose glance we intuit
This ground moves
in sharp acts
No interruption to find
the correct pause
Every radical change
emits a pulse
The strange machine
scenarios are vital
When the forest grows
it ends on a page

Guillermo Parra lives in Durham, North Carolina where he writes the blog Venepoetics <www. venepoetics.blogspot.com>. He has published Caracas Notebook (Cy Gist Press, 2006) and Phantasmal Repeats (Petrichord Books, 2009). He is currently translating the work of Venezuelan poet Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003) into English. Some of these translations can be read at Fascicle magazine <www.fascicle.com/issue03/poems/pelaez1.htm>.