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Jorge Oliva

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The Crow

The Crow


Solitude, its crows, its dogs, its pieces. John Gelman

Nicanor goes over the newspapers
and then writes the sentence: a terrible antipoem
Cardenal fingers about in the old photos
and convokes us to melancholy with a tender colloquial poem.

But all he does is throw the New York Times into the wastepaper basket
(to hell with so much violence, with so much misunderstanding),
but all he does is shut the photograph album
where the smiling faces of the family grow old,
the friends from childhood on some part of this implacable and
                                                                      beautiful Island,
and he leans out of the window
to the strangeness of the Manhattan night,
and he goes back to the table
and strikes a blow on the side of his books
and anxious looks at the telephone,
                                                   but the poem does not happen.
He opens the door, but nothing,
nobody,
there is no bird of fire,
not even a sad crow.
No one will come.
Nothing will be able to save him from this night.
from the perfect order of these walls,
                                                      from the horror
of the blank sheet of paper.

 

Translated by A. C. Tucker

Page(s) 151

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