Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Building the Boat, Trèboul (1930)

after the painting by Christopher Wood

Half-way, the basket nature of the ship

reveals itself, to us though not perhaps

to the two men or the women bringing material

or sitting in gossip on the quay, for, though real

enough to place the setting—Normandy,

let’s say—the quotidian, like drama, demands

the craned neck of symbolism and not just

the calm chew of experience.  Meaning trusts

variables, as if any sequel of actions

and jot of causes, accidents, and apprehensions

which converge into an event—a temporal

thing free from the things in it, the moral

and aesthetic, even the tangled beings involved—

yearned for the fill of horizons.  A puzzle is solved

when it can sustain, like a bulging sail, multiple

endings, all equally true and loyal

to the root of mystery.  The ship, then, is a basket

on the still-life of the dock, a cradle, though not a casket,

for who builds his own rocking end joyous

with the sweat of labor?  The ribbed beams, yes,

are skeletal, and the side planks presage the shells

we hide in to face the world.  But the swells

this vessel will ride, and the bolt and shadow

that frees the molten sea from the syllogism of meadow

and valley, tell us there is no thing or process

that doesn’t envy art’s prism of choices.

Author: Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Ricardo Pau-Llosa was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1954. He fled Cuba with his family in 1960, and in 1971, he graduated from the Belén Jesuit Preparatory High School in Miami, Florida. He received a BA from Florida International University in 1974 and an MA from Florida Atlantic University in 1976.

Pau-Llosa’s first poetry collection, Sorting Metaphors (Anhinga Press, 1983), was selected by William Stafford as the first recipient of the Anhinga Poetry Prize. Richard Wilbur writes, “Ricardo Pau-Llosa’s remarkable first book is full of poems which, however surprising or dream-like, are consistently lucid expressions of mind and world.”

Pau-Llosa is also the author of Fleeing Actium (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023); Man (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014); Parable Hunter (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008); Cuba (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1993), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Bread of the Imagined (Bilingual Press, 1992), among others. Also a critic of Latin American and Cuban art, Pau-Llosa lives in Miami.

Plume: Issue #74 September 2017