PACHECO, José Emilio

The Spider in the Holiday House Motel

The spider's been here.

Quick as a will-o-the-wisp,

tiny as a flea the spider scaled-down,

her final reduction to an almost microbial being.

She climbed into bed,

read something in the open book

and carried off a line in her claws.

Spider in the motel where no one knows anything about anyone,

she, the indifferent one, knows it all

and carries her knowledge: where?

To the negligible part of night

under her dark dominion,

some high castle

or country store of harmless silk

that our poor provisional but necessary

eyes won't see - so the world can exist -

like her web.

Wrapped up in her own arrogance she goes by again.

She wipes out one line more,

ruins the meaning.

The spider is the miniaturisation of terror.

Push her away if you wish but don't kill her.

Now you know what the spider's trying to say.


The Lives of Poets

In poetry there’s no happy ending.

Poets end up

living their madness.

And they’re quartered like cattle

(it happened to Darío).

Or they’re stoned or wind up

flinging themselves to the sea or with cyanide

salts in their mouths.

Or dead from alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty.

Or worse: canonical poets,

bitter inhabitants of a tomb

entitled Complete Works


Dichterliebe

Poetry has just one reality: suffering.

Baudelaire attests to it. Ovid would approve

of such declarations.

And this, on the other hand, guarantees

the endangered survival of an art

read by few and apparently

detested by many

as a disorder of the conscience, a remnant

from times much older than ours now

in which science claims to enjoy

an endless monopoly on magic.


The Octopus

Dark god of the deep,

fern, toadstool, hyacinth,

among stones unseen,

there in the abyss,

where at dawn, against the sun’s fire,

night falls to the sea floor and the octopus sips

a dark ink with the suckers of its tentacles.

What nocturnal beauty its splendor if sailing

in the salty half-light of the mother waters,

to it sweet and crystalline.

Yet on the beach overrun by plastic trash

this fleshy jewel of viscous vertigo

looks like a monster. And they’re

/ clubbing / the defenseless castaway to death.

Someone’s hurled a harpoon and the octopus breathes in death

through the wound, a second suffocation.

No blood flows from its lips: night gushes

and the sea mourns and the earth fades away

so very slowly while the octopus dies.

High Treason

I don’t love my country. Her abstract glory

eludes me.

But (this may sound bad) I would give my life

for ten of her places, for certain people,

ports, pine forests, fortresses,

for a ruined city, gray and monstrous,

for several of her historical figures,

for mountains

(and three or four rivers).

In Defense of Anonymity

Letter to George B. Moore:

I don't know why we write, dear George.

And at times I wonder why we publish

what we've written later.

I mean, we throw

a bottle into a sea filled

with garbage and bottles full of messages.

We'll never know

to whom the seas will deliver it, or where.

What's most likely

is that it will succumb in the storm and the abyss,

in the sand below that is death

…..
I keep thinking

that poetry is something else:

a form of love that exists only in silence,

in a secret place between two people,

almost always between two strangers