Loulou
Since a long time the parrot had been on Félicité’s mind, because
he came from America…When clouds gathered on the horizon
and the thunder rumbled, Loulou would scream, perhaps
because he remembered the storms in his native forests.
Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart
An out of place splendor
My feathers’ tropical green,
Cochineal, gold and emerald.
Plundered fantasia of America,
I am the far away, the absolute foreign.
My jailers are the anti-Adam.
Everything they name they alienate.
Like Caliban, they taught me
Language, their idiocies.
The slavery they invented
Detains and preserves
My stuffed afterlife.
In marvelous taxidermied flight
I become the Holy Ghost
To Félicité, poor countrywoman
Enraptured by my origins.
She’s the least mad
In this Cartesian country
Of my cold eternal exile.
An Anthology of 20th Century Argentinian Poetry, 1981
printed when the generals ruled
and poets the lyrical
told terror told it slant
Borges made his appearance
was it before
or after his praising of the “gentlemen”
bringing order to the country?
Alejandra Pizarnik unfazed unmoved
plucked flowers of evil
from her torment-tended garden
Gloria Orozco reported on the horoscope
and wrote odes to Berenice her regal cat
communicating from the feline afterlife
for Jacobo Fijman in the insane asylum
nothing changed
God did not change agony did not alter
I don’t recall if Juan Gelman and Julio Cortázar
were absent
from the table of contents
why don’t I remember?
bought from a street kiosk in Buenos Aries
for years its pages kept more innocent company
in the masses of my bookcases
but the book’s lack of innocence
became more pronounced
the homeliness of evil tinted
the cheap beige paper
its nondescript imageless cover
its sad guilty colorlessness
I donated it to my neighborhood bookstore
but time makes curiosity a dark longing
and the dreams
crimes occult signs
of Argentinian poets
beckon me
imprisoned sirens in the lyre’s concentration camp
they sing of abandonment
that they are not guilty
that they didn’t know
that it was not cynicism or opportunism
that I will never hear from them again
