francisco garamona en inglés

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The bus advances along the route

lighting up anything black on the way,

tilting trees that climb

their black trunks,

palm trees stirred by the wind

of a tropical cadence.

I'm riding along the roads of Corrientes Province

and I'm traveling through Entre Rios, the birthplace

of so many favorite poets, like Juanele,

Mastronardi, El Zela and Daniel Durand.

I want to talk to the girl who's sitting next to me

but I keep quiet, I look out the windows

at the black, overgrown landscape,

and I hear a monkey shrieking

his form of goodbye.

If indeed some questions

it's now too tedious to ask again

were the reason for my trip,

I harbor no resentment, nor disgust,

but rather gratitude:

behind the first few rows of ranches I make out

the sight of gauchos telling their incredible

stories around the dying embers of an asado.

I see a sheet of sandwiched insects

plastered against the glass, and a

black butterfly with two skulls on its wings

and a tiny head composed of dead eyes.

A midget with mirrored sunglasses walks down the aisle

with a big bag of potato chips under his arm,

jumps over someone to get to his seat

and then starts to chomp away at his chips

while he reads the sports section.

We pass by a service station,

hookers on the side of the road

make gestures at the cars.

I see palos borrachos, the sign for a tire shop,

and the inside of a diner where thousands

of insects swarm fluorescent bulbs.

Orange, green, yellow, blue, silver:

these are the colors silhouetted

against the black of the air.

Above it all the moon

is nodding off until daybreak

like those beggars who wander through the night,

waiting for morning to catch some sleep,

guarding against attacks

from other, more vicious beggars

who might rob them or rape them without qualm.

Night is a sanction against everyone.

The girl in the seat next to me fell asleep

and as I watch her eyelids twitch

I start to imagine what she might be dreaming.

She's headed to Santa Fe to see her father

who's in the hospital and not doing well.

She told me that she started way up in the north of Brazil

and since she doesn't have money for a plane ticket

she still has a long journey ahead of her.

I am traveling out of boredom and feel a little frivolous

talking to her about it. I think about her father,

about my father, about my friends' fathers

and I remember Fabián and his sister,

their father was very old,

he was the caretaker of a country estate

where there was a windmill

whose sails Fabián shot at with an air rifle.

Our fathers were like machines covered

in dust, birthed from the depths of a barn,

no one knew what purpose they served;

or like the locomotive whose black length

vanished along a curve in the rails as I

watched from the road, to appear

again beside a warehouse, its single light

blinking, calling out from under the

roof of the depot. Our fathers were like

those preparators who initiated themselves

into the mysteries while trying to take apart

Duchamp's tear-stained Large Glass.

But did any of us truly have fathers

that night? The midget who whose jaws crushed

fistfuls of potato chips a while ago,

was he a father? I thought he was.

And while I watched him we passed

through the first palm groves crawling with jaguars,

approaching the pink mist of the Paraguay

which was like a chain sinking below

the rushing surface of its forking waters

to be reborn as rivers everywhere.

There was a grave hidden by fronds,

a cross of two sticks tied together with string.

I saw it one second and forgot it the next.

Every journey is taken toward the past.

The bats who fly against the wind are aware of this

as they click their short wings.

I fall asleep studying the bright stars,

each one so close to the next they're like

the houses of a province seen from a helicopter.

In Entre Ríos my friends were waiting for me

with their girlfriends and they promised

they'd find me a girlfriend too.

They were the foot soldiers of the new poetry.

And after the last bars were shuttered

we would wander through the empty streets,

crossing Parque Urquiza in the direction of the river

and we would swim and stare at the sky

and watch pine trees grow on the moon.

(traducción Stuart Krimko)