por VINCENT SPINA

Vincent Spina is a professor of Spanish at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. He is a published poet, and a published literary critic. His book, El modo épico en José Luis Arguedas (Madrid, Pliegos, 1986), is considered one of the most searching in the field of studies of the Peruvian author. His new book of poetry will be published by Pecan Grove Press, of San Antonio.

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versão em português

This Grief

 

There is a custom in the Andes of placing stones

at the side of the road.  Piles can be

found at strategic points on roads throughout the mountains. The

people believe that they can place their sorrow or grief in these

stones and it will remain there as they go on.

 

Each thing we touch is alive.

The morning rooster crows.

A child’s eyes close and never open.

Place this grief in a stone.

The stone lies in a careful pile

at the top of a ridge overlooking a small town.

 

In the town plaza men and women enter the church

with gifts for Samimama and Atsilltaita who live

in the statues of Mama Virgen and Taitacristo,

so that gods won’t forget.  Men and women climb

 

the steps of the Municipio clinging to documents

to remind the mayor who remembers his youngest

son and wife at the breakfast table

that morning.  Children selling candy and

 

the morning paper.  Dogs, whose hunger and

play is to make other dogs.   The grief

 

fills the living passages of the stone.  She

keeps watch through the stone’s eyes, grows

like a memory of self, severed from self,

mingling hers with the stone’s memories,

deeper than our longest dreams.  Grief asks

 

what is she but the voice now blasting through

the loudspeakers in the plaza announcing

that the young girls from the Colegio

de Mujeres are now ready at their stands

selling all the new and delicious preparations

they have invented for chochos,

the lupine bean of our abuelos and antepasados.

 

Each young girl takes a turn explaining the new recipes,

in Spanish and Kichua and English

for the tourists who take their pictures

as they stand side by side, the arms of

each one over the shoulder of a companion

as they smile, all teeth, timidity and beauty

for the camera.

 

What more, she asks, but the child

now eating dulce de chocho, the child

who dies in the evening and now listens

from beneath the soil, a tourist’s

credit card mangled in an ATM

 

and how it all happens as though each

were a separate world coursing through us

- yet we are one -

 

in the same way the grief grows into the hill,

fertilizes the soil,

is no longer ours but

the morning itself, distilled to a liquid

 

both vital and toxic to the taste, flooding

the square, changing the script of the documents

the mayor now reads, no longer us,

but this gaze, indifferent and pure

through the eyes of a stone.