Spring/Summer 2007, Volume 23.3

Poetry

Photo of Luis Benitez.

Luis Benitez

Luis Benítez was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has received the title of Compagnon de la Poésie, from La Porte des Poétes Association, France. His 10 books of poetry, two essays and two novels were published in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela and the USA. He has received numerous awards for his work.


 

Frogs, Unique Masters of the Dark

The greenish trombone of the pond
begs for whoever knows what,
whether, if the fecundity of its species
always affects the green lust
or the imperious universe that rules us.

A bag of hormones that barely lives
between two summers in the filthy water
that turns out to be untouchable: from so much life
the death that guides the wheels of the trucks
passes along from the left of their throats
and they keep on singing and may be saying:
I saw the plant of the categorical dinosaurs pass
from a shorter distance, where it was beating like now.
How can dinosaur created by man’s industry scare me more
than their cities, their blows made with stones
or the hate they have scattered on the Earth?
The child of the chimpanzee, like his father
prematurely extinguishes.
This is for sure
and I obtain his long tiresome speeches.
Green husband of the ten thousand eggs,
each summer he knows that almost nothing remains
due to his sister-in-law, the death,
and on the side where this relative is
there is his side and the world of manhood.
Swollen happy instrument
that keeps on returning again and again
the pages of the eternal life score
and does not need to listen to the whole ensemble
to know for sure that his ones are flooding the lounge
where for one moment we were contemplating the orchestra.

 

 

One Heron in Buenos Aires

Some paint brush described
a thin and white letter S
on the brown water and there
suddenly was the heron.
The tourists did not see her,
but she did see everything and everyone,
quick and motionless on the miracle of the water.
A mirror in the middle of the negligent city, transparently painted,
an open buttonhole that she fastened at a sole moment,
all garments dressed by the winter.
She kept at the fatal shore of her own Amazon,
the contemptuous foot fold over and over against her own body,
as to say my balance is done
of a perennial profile
and of a perennial way that do not recognize them.
It was a patient harpoon only paying attention to the calculus
between the playful shriek of the domestic ducks.
Only she is precise like a tiny scythe
at the Japanese Garden that merrily exposed her graces,
with that eastern serenity that knows nothing
of the brutal murders of a hungry heron.
All have left, but equal way I have seen nothing:
a second has been missing among the things, I believed;
an instant at the following instant
was bloodily jumped over,
but when the heron flew away
another life than hers at the pond was missing.


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