By Luis Alberto Ambroggio

 

THE WITNESS BARES HIS SOUL TO NELA RIO

 

By Luis Alberto Ambroggio

Translated by Elizabeth Miller Gamble and Naomi Ayala

 

Why do I write?

To crucify myself and be reborn later as innocent, moist soil.

To be the last and the first.

To stop the river at once in my hand and drink water.

So that when others sip the drops they’ll know there is a river.

Because my back teeth chatter from the cold, from stone and fury

And because the shadows of my days and nights

lose all of their hieroglyphics.

So that I am understood, and not understood,

by those who stroll down the streetwearing all kinds of hats.

So that those who do understand me

can invent me without suffering backaches.

I write to sow multicolored ashes in The Vast Solitude and The Great Silence

And because without trying to kiss, I kiss, and without trying to die, I die.

And I get away with hands full of contemptible nights of insomnia

To transform night into joyful light and day into two red dreams.

I write to repeat myself all the way into oblivion

and remember oblivion in each verse

And because in this way the beginning and the end

become inextinguishable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE WEIGHT OF THE BODIES

 

By: Luis Alberto Ambroggio

Translated by Yvette Neisser

 

 

In the depth of the tombs

In the depth of the seas

In the depth of the rustling winds

-Vicente Huidobro

 

The sentence of a body

transcends the gods’ apathy.

Docile bodies before the fury of waves.

Stubborn bodies at death and resurrection

and later luminosity.

Bodies that are trees, that are wide seas,

that are damp earth,

that are clamor and absence,

that charge into the wind

and cry and demand a million times

the way back

because they never lose their memory.

Spirit-bodies that rise

to defy death

like an ever-vigilant light.

 

We give the bodies their wings.

                       

 

THE FALLEN

 

By Luis Alberto Ambroggio

translated by C.M.Mayo

 

 

The lark has died in mid-air

not knowing how to fall

— Superveille

 

 

Dear Lord of the Universe, take to heaven the airplanes that fall

because with them we rise until we sense your name,

          turbines,

          seats,

          lights,

          wheels, windows,

          their halos broken,

majestic ships, dolphins of the air,

that fly again to you like the manes of stallions

in the rite of tears, in the gasping smoke of prayer.

 

Boeing Flight 800, grand gleaming carriage, “bull of the sky”

I, pilot, crew member, engineer of your prowess, I cry for you,

Titan who moves cities.

 

From your specter spring questions:

Which ideology brought you down the route to the Paris of romantics?

Which of destiny’s precious stones so fatally allured you

          like an enraged bull rushing against its death?

Are the children of your belly victims of an explosion of electric nerves,

vertigo of bolts, human frailty or your stars’ rebuff?

 

The galley of your remains does not rest on an ocean’s edge.

Neither does it fancy the myth of archeology.

Nor answer mermaids’ seductive songs.

Your splendor, in an instant, turned to

          chunks of hot flesh

                   aluminum tears,

          meteors of a smashed god,

          quiver plucked clean.

          And there they rest with gaping wounds.

 

This is why I ask as if of the infinite

I who am dust, smoke, atom and rage

Who was it that dared to cast down the city of the air,

bury the unsinkable ship’s roar?

 

Righteous Lord of the Universe

do not forget Valujet

after its name is gone,

this small plane

humble ebony carriage

dead-beat proletarian fare

in search of a free cemetery

national park,

swamps to bury savings and greed

youthful adventures.

Remember the bird with its injured tail

that found in the Everglades altars of clay

with candles of reeds to cover its spent old age.

What do alligators do with the pain of its entrails?

Small gazelle that rests beneath an orchid-grave

sunken with the humble weight of your dead.

 

Just Lord of the Universe

redeem Pan Am from Lockerbie and Airbus from the Persian sky

other holocausts unrecorded and unforgotten

redeem them with each of their martyred pieces.

Melt the dagger that plucked off cadavers to the wind

warm red open flowers

and strange petals

that bled into wounded space.

 

Thousands of times, Ultimate Lord of the Universe, bring back

the lark that has died in mid-air