Un Detective ViejoBy Franco Strong
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Pallid smoke pressed upon
stratified layers of oceanic fog.
Infiltrations amongst our vision,
our Being.
Exiled,
two birds of prey,
extinct and unremembered.
Lukewarm currents quiver
above bowed heads, spilling
dead feathers
across
two continents.
“A man devoid of history.”
So we gave him one.
An Old Detective,
trench-coat, hat,
rusted revolver tucked in
his waist. Empty bullet
casings
for teeth.
A geometry laid
over his face.
Rhombus. Trapezoid.
A cuneiform language
dripping
from his eyes.
We found him.
Or perhaps he found us.
Resting on the edge of
the Mojave. Frontier. Sprawl.
And we, one, two, us.
Cartographers dancing on
the lips of a
translucent,
open maw.
Our Old Detective huddled
over trenches and
embers of his last case.
Ashen words
which we inhaled. Intoxicating. He told us:
“I’ve witnessed the rupture of Poetry.”
“Heard the Monolith.”
“The well where
language disintegrates, unable to
claw its way out.
Stone walls impossibly slick,
fermented moss sleeps
between the crepuscular fractures.”
His hands were two
stray dogs and I
dreamt of euthanasia.
Had the case become ours?
Ashen words
bequeathed to us,
a scent infused with
voices skipping
like stones across
a Continental Void.
In my tired seasons I
still inhale his breath
and yours.
We, us, one, two
contingent inheritors, ephemeral
brothers in time.
Students alike.
Neither over the age of
22
Enrolled in
an Amnesiac University
Magnetized by his
ashen words
we returned and carried a burden,
The Procession of Poetry,
to the Mojave.
Raw documents for
our Old Detective.
A circuitous vulture
(geometry of scythe and sickle)
he plucked the eyes
from the verses of Milton.
He left Quevedo fingerless
and unfeeling, skeletal extremities.
Pessoa’s intestines, Eliot’s liver
consumed by his
razored beak.
William Carlos Williams was
a helpless paraplegic,
numb limbs picked clean,
tendons and bones ocher-white.
We saw Ginsburg left deaf and mute,
throat excavated
by a curved mandible.
Our Old Detective
(circuitous vulture)
still presided over
the last case:
the frozen corpse
of poetry-
a rigor-mortis cadaver.
Ruminations on the unsaid,
the impossible language
used to coldly probe,
decipher, sequence,
a subterranean investigation
gone frigid from listless years.
“Pour us another drink,”
he said. Tucked in
his waist a rusted revolver
shifted like a benign
tumor. His hands were calcified fossils and
we, us, one, two, dreamt of
the invisible Armageddon, unseen.
“Poetic verse is the
Apocryphal text.” he said.
“Pour us another drink.”
I saw the transient,
hidden migratory
patterns between us, my
brother and I, one, two, us
from here to there,
from the Amnesiac University
to this Crystalized Frontier.
We passed through both
as ancient smoke signals,
fanned by indigenous hands,
unnoticed, perhaps, in the
viscous language and geometric
algorithms of our
Old Detective.
“Rupture and Poetry”
my brother said.
“Death and Aesthetics”
I replied. We laughed.
Ahead of us: desert, nothingness,
ceaseless incision of the horizon.
Farther off, a return
to the tentacles of urbanization. And
perhaps we laughed,
together,
for the last time.
We returned to
the Mojave years
later, older, wiser,
we assumed.
Our Old Detective
hadn’t aged a day.
Or we hadn’t noticed.
The geometry of
his face indivisible
(rectangular prism, pyramid, triangle)
immutable in a way,
or at least to us.
Our Old Detective, his
last case still open,
flayed like butcher’s
meat. Suture-less wounds.
How best to measure
the stillness of
his meditation?
Inches, Miles, Days, Years, a Life,
Generations.
Ashen words still potent, he tells us:
“Interruptions of Poetry.”
“Dislocations of language.”
“Fractured tongues and throats made
of earthenware from disappeared cultures,
unrecognizable from the
high plains and shallow
trenches
where we left them.”
We, one, two, us,
inheritors of the burden,
The Procession of Poetry,
we read aloud the raw
documentation:
verses of Rilk and Whitman,
Breton and Drummon de Andrade
piled atop one another.
Beneath his vultured gaze,
a return of
extremities and limbs,
atrophied forearms and leathered torsos.
Winged descent of
our Old Detective
atop Sor Juana and Garcia Lorca.
Homeric verses subsumed by
the shuddered treacle
of trench-coat, hat,
rusted revolver, and invisible
cigarette smoke.
“Disappeared fictions,” he breathed
with ashen words.
“Less than meaningless.”
“They play charades atop
the pages of a dead book.”
“Pour me another drink.” His hands
were frozen glaciers and
we dreamt of the invisible terminal
point thawing through
deliquesced fissures.
We, us, one, two,
pressed father upon the subterranean
silence of our Old Detective.
My brother offered the triptych
of Mayakovsky, József, and Vallejo.
I recited a verse of Neruda,
O’Hara, and Lihn.
A change in our Old Detective,
we sensed a reflection
of his rusted revolver
aimed
at us
simultaneously.
Photosynthetic laughter
of blackened light
took root in our
ears, our thoughts.
“Kill the translators,” he said,
commands we knew he’d
echoed before.
“They try to translate us Latin Americans.
But the psychiatric ward has
been left unattended. The
doctors have vanished, taken their notes.”
“We write what we see, what we’ve
learned, in a language invented
by the patients.”
We, one, two, us, sensed
a crease in the ossified
case of our Old Detective,
an opening, a way through.
Or perhaps the maw unlatched,
and we were blind to the precipice.
A ripple in history,
our Old Detective
made of flesh and bone.
We pressed on, into his case, with
translations of Zurita,
Paz, and Gonzalo Rojas,
And offering of Herberto Padilla,
Nicanor Parra, and Álvaro Mutis.
“Old, senile faux-prophets,” he said.
Our Old Detective recited a verse in Spanish
neither of us understood.
Between his folded words
we felt a dormant poison rising.
His laugher unheard,
rusted revolver unseen,
still.
“Kill Borges,” he said.
An epoch of abysses
flooded my bother’s eyes
and I detected the criminal
current lashing and separating us.
Our Old Detective floated
between us with ashen words.
“Dead discourse, territories immune to
our language. I searched them out.”
“Imagine me younger, bright-eyed,
skin still moist like a salamander.
They sent me with 18 bullets
and a badge
taken from a dead officer.
I searched for the missing students, like you,
those with Borges, Neruda, and Paz
circulating in their blood. They left behind
a hollowed university.
Doors were left unlatched,
classrooms emptier than sleep.
The long hallways
watched with a silent criticism
aimed at intruders.”
“Weeks later I found
one, a single student, alone.
She slept in a custodial office
wrapped in cloth scarred
over with absences unwound.
Her eyes were two sunken
submarines lost in her cranium.”
He roused her, seeking
information he knew she possessed.
She spoke a drowning Castilian,
Spanish unraveling on the edge
of a black mass.
“Have you ever seen a rodent
trapped, unable to free itself,
starving? It cannibalizes
its own limbs seeking to escape.
We were rodents, all of us
caught within industrial pincers
of a phantom machine.
Some had deciphered the formula
of our second baptism,
while others remained unaware.”
Skeletal remains and a
throat of thistle, the girl was
useless to our Old Detective.
But he gazed upon it for
the first time, hieroglyphs,
symbols, scratched into
concrete walls. Blotches of
ink given to paper
like a sacrifice.
“I slapped her around a bit.
I pulled the papers
from her arms
and asked what the symbols meant.
Where the fuck were her fellow
Students?”
Adjacent answers funneled through
the shattered woman.
“She spoke, or rather, she squealed
an answer. Her sunken eyes
resurrected and bulged from
her head, a gecko shrieking with
a rodent’s tongue and Castilian
throat, chirping and squealing at me,
deranged, psychotic,
with rabies beneath her fingernails.”
He locked her in the
custodial cell but
left with the papers in one hand,
revolver infused with sweat.
“I did my job. I studied
the symbols. They occupied
my every waking moment.
Permanent sutures sowed
into a mental vanishing point.
I walked through a city
that wasn’t my own, a city
that was dreamed by someone else.
And I figured it out, I arrived at
an end. Someone else dreamed
of a terminal point for me
from our abandoned psychiatric ward.”
A corporeal city
dreamed by another. Our Detective
pieced the symbols together,
subliminal hieroglyphs reconfigured
in his mind.
The hollowed pores of
his city’s skin harbored them,
an ancient network
of chambers beneath
the avenues and calles.
“They weren’t far below. At times
you could hear the pedestrian
footsteps of those above. The
chambers were everywhere,
the outskirts of the city,
the ports, financial districts,
the city’s center.
A subterranean map grafted
onto the flesh
of the city.
And in those hypodermic
veins and arteries, churning
in jagged, rusted blood, I found
them, the students.
Complete tabula-rasa,
expressionless, drought, dead soil
pressed upon their delicate bones,
waiting for the rains
of a new ordered sequence.
You see, the students preyed on the others,
took them, abducted them.
There was a swath of disappeared citizens,
the poor, the discarded, the diseased,
those souls untethered
to the metropolis above.
The students lured the
disappeared into the labyrinthine
network below, rows of
caged chambers.
The students gathered around their wretched
hostages who sang in a tortured chorus-
their flesh guilty of being flesh,
only sentenced to bleed.
Students with Borges, Neruda,
Lihn, Reyes in their shared being
forged a new poetry
within mediaeval classrooms
of brick and iron.
I caught glimpses of
their new poetry, stanzas, free verse,
hexametric, quatrain, nicharchean, tetrastich
written in the language
of the indecipherable symbols, hieroglyphs,
scattered, alien letters and blotches of ink.
The students stood, sat, watched the tortured
captives—those disappeared, voiceless--
who sang beneath our
city in murmured choruses. The tortured
voices were elemental, divine in a way,
an extension of Nature unimpeded.
And the students composed poems
in their new language, a pure
language, untampered by humanity’s
temporal stains, freed of sentimentalism
and metaphor, released from the mediation
of imprecise language.
I admit, when I heard the
voiceless chorus and deciphered the
poems, the conjunction of the
two produced a cold, metallic
beauty, like a new mathematics,
an algebraic theorem, simple, self-evident,
transparent
an explanation of everything
preceding our existence and
everything to come,
frigid in a way yet
altogether elegant.”
Was it here, brother, where I became I
and you became You? The charcoaled
words of our Old Detective awakened
the valleys and barrancas between
us. You detected the divine revelation
of our Old Detective, intoxicated
by the promises of poetry
and I withdrew from the oceanic currents
you yearned to cross at nightfall.
I still dream of You, an absent-brother,
stalking the beachhead, offering yourself
to the currents and sirens
I ceased to hear.
Our Old Detective asked:
“What’s the difference between
an assassin and a detective?
Amount of bullets, that’s it.
Once you run out of bullets you’re
no longer an assassin.
Me, I was an assassin for the
length of 17 bullets.
My superiors gave me order. No, I couldn’t
assassinate our students, our sons and
daughters with Lugones, Vallejo, Borges
in their veins. No, I was to assassinate the
chorus of disappeared voices, strip the
students of their tortured Muses. They’ll
return to us afterwards.”
“Now count to 17 for me, aloud,
and imagine 17 voices silenced
between cold walls of medieval chambers.
The best way to silence someone
is to aim for the jugular, right there,
ensuring the disappeared will never
speak again.
I was good at what it I did,
efficient, quiet,
left no trace behind. I always thought
of sunflowers whenever I pulled
the trigger, something unequivocally
pleasant, sunflowers raising their
massive heads after the rains, some residue
image left over from my childhood.
You can silence the
disappeared, think of other things all
you want, but eventually they take
residence here, in your head,
lodged there, like transient pilgrims
who refuse to move on. So I saved one
bullet for myself, one bulled to exhume
their voices.
Yet here I am,
the final bullet laying dormant
in my rusted revolver.
One day I’ll have the courage.”
“I fled, through the
turbulent navel of Latin America,
carrying the confiscated notebooks of
poetry like a cypher. I tried to move on,
settle into a new life, but I caught
glimpses of it, La poesía nueva I called it,
scrawled in a bathroom in Montevido.
I saw lines of graffiti in
Havana and Carcaras bearing
a resemblance to the new poetry.
Once I caught a line of
it written on a napkin
in a Buenos Aires restaurant.
In Santiago I saw handwritten
stanzas in the margins of library books.
In Lima I saw symbols
woven into textiles.
In Mexico City I found
a literary magazine dedicated to
a few printed lines of it. And in
Juarez I saw it tattooed into
the necks and torsos of young men.
They’ve been born into it, known
it all their lives.
It’s theirs now, an uncontained poetics, their
cantos, though at times they
don’t even know they compose
in the same language, in the language
I carried beneath my arms.
Verses inscribed in notebooks
mirroring verses inscribed
upon bodies.”
Oil spilled from our
Old Detective, enticing,
a toxic kaleidoscope
outstretched, laid before us.
You heard it, didn’t you, brother,
tumbling along the precipice of our
Old Detective’s mouth,
the emergence of a poetics
you had yet to savor.
And I heard the chorus
of disappeared, a hymn
impregnated with the genealogy
of absence.
“I’ve seen traces of it
here, in the Mojave, single symbols
sprayed onto the rusted
spinal columns of passing trains.
The hieroglyphs flash
momentarily
before your eyes, then disappear
into the horizon.
The rail-lines continue on,
running parallel alongside
Tecate, Mexicali, Nogales,
San Diego, Los Angeles.
I can take both of you,
show you the signs. They’re
not much older than you two, those
who have built the parapets of a
new poetics. I can teach you
how to navigate the
terminal point between our language
and the banality of madness.”
An Old Detective
and his last case
bequeathed to us, you, I, Brothers
no longer.
You hesitated, inhaled,
while I escaped the smoking
horizon.
His hand were your hands
and I still dream of
them around my throat.
I retreated from the desert,
alone
while you remained in
the ever-absent sea
with a rusted revolver
beneath the husk of feathered wings.
You are not I, which
I’ve come to realize
amounts to almost nothing.
I never saw you
again, brother. Poetry,
for me, ceased to solidify
into any semblance of meaning. Fissures.
Ruptures. Interrupted by a negative expanse.
But I dream of
you in unremembered waking moments.
I’m pulled through a catacomb
of patterns and shapes
overlaid atop one another
(cylinder, square, triangular pyramid),
harboring your absence.
At times I sense you there,
just South, where worlds drift in.
I sense you in the loneliness
of deserted bones, in smothered
footsteps, in the corrupted throats
of children, in watchmen who
canvas the desert, in calloused hands
and wet crevices, in intestines lined with
a toxic haze, in choking breaths
unheard, in industrial factories
churning out a trickling
genocide, in the indifference
of Northern eyes, in the earthly
tremors widening to
swallow waves of
women.
I sense your discursive
hand behind it, I recognize your
poetic inclinations. Sometimes I imagine
you, not you truly but the traces and
ghosts of you, with a practiced
and perfected craft, a language
evolved through a hermeneutic seal,
proliferating and inveterate.
How can the Procession of Poetry
continue? What requiem will
signal what you’ve come to understand?
Impenetrable we believe
these walls to be, those of us peering
beyond the borders of our Numantia.
Withered years. Sceptic cochlear canals.
Muscular atrophy.
Tired season pass
and the doors are no longer
sealed.
Winds blow in from
the South and I taste
you against the dead feathers
of birds unremembered.
The currents shift,
then return, atop
the ever-absent sea.
Exiled,
forged with a new tongue,
new lips.
The taste of a bitter,
salinized fog pressed upon
pallid smoke,
drifting,
across two continents.
stratified layers of oceanic fog.
Infiltrations amongst our vision,
our Being.
Exiled,
two birds of prey,
extinct and unremembered.
Lukewarm currents quiver
above bowed heads, spilling
dead feathers
across
two continents.
“A man devoid of history.”
So we gave him one.
An Old Detective,
trench-coat, hat,
rusted revolver tucked in
his waist. Empty bullet
casings
for teeth.
A geometry laid
over his face.
Rhombus. Trapezoid.
A cuneiform language
dripping
from his eyes.
We found him.
Or perhaps he found us.
Resting on the edge of
the Mojave. Frontier. Sprawl.
And we, one, two, us.
Cartographers dancing on
the lips of a
translucent,
open maw.
Our Old Detective huddled
over trenches and
embers of his last case.
Ashen words
which we inhaled. Intoxicating. He told us:
“I’ve witnessed the rupture of Poetry.”
“Heard the Monolith.”
“The well where
language disintegrates, unable to
claw its way out.
Stone walls impossibly slick,
fermented moss sleeps
between the crepuscular fractures.”
His hands were two
stray dogs and I
dreamt of euthanasia.
Had the case become ours?
Ashen words
bequeathed to us,
a scent infused with
voices skipping
like stones across
a Continental Void.
In my tired seasons I
still inhale his breath
and yours.
We, us, one, two
contingent inheritors, ephemeral
brothers in time.
Students alike.
Neither over the age of
22
Enrolled in
an Amnesiac University
Magnetized by his
ashen words
we returned and carried a burden,
The Procession of Poetry,
to the Mojave.
Raw documents for
our Old Detective.
A circuitous vulture
(geometry of scythe and sickle)
he plucked the eyes
from the verses of Milton.
He left Quevedo fingerless
and unfeeling, skeletal extremities.
Pessoa’s intestines, Eliot’s liver
consumed by his
razored beak.
William Carlos Williams was
a helpless paraplegic,
numb limbs picked clean,
tendons and bones ocher-white.
We saw Ginsburg left deaf and mute,
throat excavated
by a curved mandible.
Our Old Detective
(circuitous vulture)
still presided over
the last case:
the frozen corpse
of poetry-
a rigor-mortis cadaver.
Ruminations on the unsaid,
the impossible language
used to coldly probe,
decipher, sequence,
a subterranean investigation
gone frigid from listless years.
“Pour us another drink,”
he said. Tucked in
his waist a rusted revolver
shifted like a benign
tumor. His hands were calcified fossils and
we, us, one, two, dreamt of
the invisible Armageddon, unseen.
“Poetic verse is the
Apocryphal text.” he said.
“Pour us another drink.”
I saw the transient,
hidden migratory
patterns between us, my
brother and I, one, two, us
from here to there,
from the Amnesiac University
to this Crystalized Frontier.
We passed through both
as ancient smoke signals,
fanned by indigenous hands,
unnoticed, perhaps, in the
viscous language and geometric
algorithms of our
Old Detective.
“Rupture and Poetry”
my brother said.
“Death and Aesthetics”
I replied. We laughed.
Ahead of us: desert, nothingness,
ceaseless incision of the horizon.
Farther off, a return
to the tentacles of urbanization. And
perhaps we laughed,
together,
for the last time.
We returned to
the Mojave years
later, older, wiser,
we assumed.
Our Old Detective
hadn’t aged a day.
Or we hadn’t noticed.
The geometry of
his face indivisible
(rectangular prism, pyramid, triangle)
immutable in a way,
or at least to us.
Our Old Detective, his
last case still open,
flayed like butcher’s
meat. Suture-less wounds.
How best to measure
the stillness of
his meditation?
Inches, Miles, Days, Years, a Life,
Generations.
Ashen words still potent, he tells us:
“Interruptions of Poetry.”
“Dislocations of language.”
“Fractured tongues and throats made
of earthenware from disappeared cultures,
unrecognizable from the
high plains and shallow
trenches
where we left them.”
We, one, two, us,
inheritors of the burden,
The Procession of Poetry,
we read aloud the raw
documentation:
verses of Rilk and Whitman,
Breton and Drummon de Andrade
piled atop one another.
Beneath his vultured gaze,
a return of
extremities and limbs,
atrophied forearms and leathered torsos.
Winged descent of
our Old Detective
atop Sor Juana and Garcia Lorca.
Homeric verses subsumed by
the shuddered treacle
of trench-coat, hat,
rusted revolver, and invisible
cigarette smoke.
“Disappeared fictions,” he breathed
with ashen words.
“Less than meaningless.”
“They play charades atop
the pages of a dead book.”
“Pour me another drink.” His hands
were frozen glaciers and
we dreamt of the invisible terminal
point thawing through
deliquesced fissures.
We, us, one, two,
pressed father upon the subterranean
silence of our Old Detective.
My brother offered the triptych
of Mayakovsky, József, and Vallejo.
I recited a verse of Neruda,
O’Hara, and Lihn.
A change in our Old Detective,
we sensed a reflection
of his rusted revolver
aimed
at us
simultaneously.
Photosynthetic laughter
of blackened light
took root in our
ears, our thoughts.
“Kill the translators,” he said,
commands we knew he’d
echoed before.
“They try to translate us Latin Americans.
But the psychiatric ward has
been left unattended. The
doctors have vanished, taken their notes.”
“We write what we see, what we’ve
learned, in a language invented
by the patients.”
We, one, two, us, sensed
a crease in the ossified
case of our Old Detective,
an opening, a way through.
Or perhaps the maw unlatched,
and we were blind to the precipice.
A ripple in history,
our Old Detective
made of flesh and bone.
We pressed on, into his case, with
translations of Zurita,
Paz, and Gonzalo Rojas,
And offering of Herberto Padilla,
Nicanor Parra, and Álvaro Mutis.
“Old, senile faux-prophets,” he said.
Our Old Detective recited a verse in Spanish
neither of us understood.
Between his folded words
we felt a dormant poison rising.
His laugher unheard,
rusted revolver unseen,
still.
“Kill Borges,” he said.
An epoch of abysses
flooded my bother’s eyes
and I detected the criminal
current lashing and separating us.
Our Old Detective floated
between us with ashen words.
“Dead discourse, territories immune to
our language. I searched them out.”
“Imagine me younger, bright-eyed,
skin still moist like a salamander.
They sent me with 18 bullets
and a badge
taken from a dead officer.
I searched for the missing students, like you,
those with Borges, Neruda, and Paz
circulating in their blood. They left behind
a hollowed university.
Doors were left unlatched,
classrooms emptier than sleep.
The long hallways
watched with a silent criticism
aimed at intruders.”
“Weeks later I found
one, a single student, alone.
She slept in a custodial office
wrapped in cloth scarred
over with absences unwound.
Her eyes were two sunken
submarines lost in her cranium.”
He roused her, seeking
information he knew she possessed.
She spoke a drowning Castilian,
Spanish unraveling on the edge
of a black mass.
“Have you ever seen a rodent
trapped, unable to free itself,
starving? It cannibalizes
its own limbs seeking to escape.
We were rodents, all of us
caught within industrial pincers
of a phantom machine.
Some had deciphered the formula
of our second baptism,
while others remained unaware.”
Skeletal remains and a
throat of thistle, the girl was
useless to our Old Detective.
But he gazed upon it for
the first time, hieroglyphs,
symbols, scratched into
concrete walls. Blotches of
ink given to paper
like a sacrifice.
“I slapped her around a bit.
I pulled the papers
from her arms
and asked what the symbols meant.
Where the fuck were her fellow
Students?”
Adjacent answers funneled through
the shattered woman.
“She spoke, or rather, she squealed
an answer. Her sunken eyes
resurrected and bulged from
her head, a gecko shrieking with
a rodent’s tongue and Castilian
throat, chirping and squealing at me,
deranged, psychotic,
with rabies beneath her fingernails.”
He locked her in the
custodial cell but
left with the papers in one hand,
revolver infused with sweat.
“I did my job. I studied
the symbols. They occupied
my every waking moment.
Permanent sutures sowed
into a mental vanishing point.
I walked through a city
that wasn’t my own, a city
that was dreamed by someone else.
And I figured it out, I arrived at
an end. Someone else dreamed
of a terminal point for me
from our abandoned psychiatric ward.”
A corporeal city
dreamed by another. Our Detective
pieced the symbols together,
subliminal hieroglyphs reconfigured
in his mind.
The hollowed pores of
his city’s skin harbored them,
an ancient network
of chambers beneath
the avenues and calles.
“They weren’t far below. At times
you could hear the pedestrian
footsteps of those above. The
chambers were everywhere,
the outskirts of the city,
the ports, financial districts,
the city’s center.
A subterranean map grafted
onto the flesh
of the city.
And in those hypodermic
veins and arteries, churning
in jagged, rusted blood, I found
them, the students.
Complete tabula-rasa,
expressionless, drought, dead soil
pressed upon their delicate bones,
waiting for the rains
of a new ordered sequence.
You see, the students preyed on the others,
took them, abducted them.
There was a swath of disappeared citizens,
the poor, the discarded, the diseased,
those souls untethered
to the metropolis above.
The students lured the
disappeared into the labyrinthine
network below, rows of
caged chambers.
The students gathered around their wretched
hostages who sang in a tortured chorus-
their flesh guilty of being flesh,
only sentenced to bleed.
Students with Borges, Neruda,
Lihn, Reyes in their shared being
forged a new poetry
within mediaeval classrooms
of brick and iron.
I caught glimpses of
their new poetry, stanzas, free verse,
hexametric, quatrain, nicharchean, tetrastich
written in the language
of the indecipherable symbols, hieroglyphs,
scattered, alien letters and blotches of ink.
The students stood, sat, watched the tortured
captives—those disappeared, voiceless--
who sang beneath our
city in murmured choruses. The tortured
voices were elemental, divine in a way,
an extension of Nature unimpeded.
And the students composed poems
in their new language, a pure
language, untampered by humanity’s
temporal stains, freed of sentimentalism
and metaphor, released from the mediation
of imprecise language.
I admit, when I heard the
voiceless chorus and deciphered the
poems, the conjunction of the
two produced a cold, metallic
beauty, like a new mathematics,
an algebraic theorem, simple, self-evident,
transparent
an explanation of everything
preceding our existence and
everything to come,
frigid in a way yet
altogether elegant.”
Was it here, brother, where I became I
and you became You? The charcoaled
words of our Old Detective awakened
the valleys and barrancas between
us. You detected the divine revelation
of our Old Detective, intoxicated
by the promises of poetry
and I withdrew from the oceanic currents
you yearned to cross at nightfall.
I still dream of You, an absent-brother,
stalking the beachhead, offering yourself
to the currents and sirens
I ceased to hear.
Our Old Detective asked:
“What’s the difference between
an assassin and a detective?
Amount of bullets, that’s it.
Once you run out of bullets you’re
no longer an assassin.
Me, I was an assassin for the
length of 17 bullets.
My superiors gave me order. No, I couldn’t
assassinate our students, our sons and
daughters with Lugones, Vallejo, Borges
in their veins. No, I was to assassinate the
chorus of disappeared voices, strip the
students of their tortured Muses. They’ll
return to us afterwards.”
“Now count to 17 for me, aloud,
and imagine 17 voices silenced
between cold walls of medieval chambers.
The best way to silence someone
is to aim for the jugular, right there,
ensuring the disappeared will never
speak again.
I was good at what it I did,
efficient, quiet,
left no trace behind. I always thought
of sunflowers whenever I pulled
the trigger, something unequivocally
pleasant, sunflowers raising their
massive heads after the rains, some residue
image left over from my childhood.
You can silence the
disappeared, think of other things all
you want, but eventually they take
residence here, in your head,
lodged there, like transient pilgrims
who refuse to move on. So I saved one
bullet for myself, one bulled to exhume
their voices.
Yet here I am,
the final bullet laying dormant
in my rusted revolver.
One day I’ll have the courage.”
“I fled, through the
turbulent navel of Latin America,
carrying the confiscated notebooks of
poetry like a cypher. I tried to move on,
settle into a new life, but I caught
glimpses of it, La poesía nueva I called it,
scrawled in a bathroom in Montevido.
I saw lines of graffiti in
Havana and Carcaras bearing
a resemblance to the new poetry.
Once I caught a line of
it written on a napkin
in a Buenos Aires restaurant.
In Santiago I saw handwritten
stanzas in the margins of library books.
In Lima I saw symbols
woven into textiles.
In Mexico City I found
a literary magazine dedicated to
a few printed lines of it. And in
Juarez I saw it tattooed into
the necks and torsos of young men.
They’ve been born into it, known
it all their lives.
It’s theirs now, an uncontained poetics, their
cantos, though at times they
don’t even know they compose
in the same language, in the language
I carried beneath my arms.
Verses inscribed in notebooks
mirroring verses inscribed
upon bodies.”
Oil spilled from our
Old Detective, enticing,
a toxic kaleidoscope
outstretched, laid before us.
You heard it, didn’t you, brother,
tumbling along the precipice of our
Old Detective’s mouth,
the emergence of a poetics
you had yet to savor.
And I heard the chorus
of disappeared, a hymn
impregnated with the genealogy
of absence.
“I’ve seen traces of it
here, in the Mojave, single symbols
sprayed onto the rusted
spinal columns of passing trains.
The hieroglyphs flash
momentarily
before your eyes, then disappear
into the horizon.
The rail-lines continue on,
running parallel alongside
Tecate, Mexicali, Nogales,
San Diego, Los Angeles.
I can take both of you,
show you the signs. They’re
not much older than you two, those
who have built the parapets of a
new poetics. I can teach you
how to navigate the
terminal point between our language
and the banality of madness.”
An Old Detective
and his last case
bequeathed to us, you, I, Brothers
no longer.
You hesitated, inhaled,
while I escaped the smoking
horizon.
His hand were your hands
and I still dream of
them around my throat.
I retreated from the desert,
alone
while you remained in
the ever-absent sea
with a rusted revolver
beneath the husk of feathered wings.
You are not I, which
I’ve come to realize
amounts to almost nothing.
I never saw you
again, brother. Poetry,
for me, ceased to solidify
into any semblance of meaning. Fissures.
Ruptures. Interrupted by a negative expanse.
But I dream of
you in unremembered waking moments.
I’m pulled through a catacomb
of patterns and shapes
overlaid atop one another
(cylinder, square, triangular pyramid),
harboring your absence.
At times I sense you there,
just South, where worlds drift in.
I sense you in the loneliness
of deserted bones, in smothered
footsteps, in the corrupted throats
of children, in watchmen who
canvas the desert, in calloused hands
and wet crevices, in intestines lined with
a toxic haze, in choking breaths
unheard, in industrial factories
churning out a trickling
genocide, in the indifference
of Northern eyes, in the earthly
tremors widening to
swallow waves of
women.
I sense your discursive
hand behind it, I recognize your
poetic inclinations. Sometimes I imagine
you, not you truly but the traces and
ghosts of you, with a practiced
and perfected craft, a language
evolved through a hermeneutic seal,
proliferating and inveterate.
How can the Procession of Poetry
continue? What requiem will
signal what you’ve come to understand?
Impenetrable we believe
these walls to be, those of us peering
beyond the borders of our Numantia.
Withered years. Sceptic cochlear canals.
Muscular atrophy.
Tired season pass
and the doors are no longer
sealed.
Winds blow in from
the South and I taste
you against the dead feathers
of birds unremembered.
The currents shift,
then return, atop
the ever-absent sea.
Exiled,
forged with a new tongue,
new lips.
The taste of a bitter,
salinized fog pressed upon
pallid smoke,
drifting,
across two continents.
Franco Strong takes his inspiration in equal measure from his studies in philosophy and the almost ceaseless sunshine of Southern California/ Northern Mexico. His work centers on the US/Mexico border and the ethereal space it occupies both geographically and psychologically.