Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Willem Van de Velde the Younger, Ships in a Gale (1660)

The storm dissolves the difference between wave,
rock, and plank, which calm asserts.
The ships seem doomed, masts tilting, naves
rattled, the brink life always is
set in bleakness cinema. An outcrop of granite
that smashed one vessel now gathers
dots of men in crests that just might
toss them to a safe height. An egg’s changes
for the moment’s fish, but bets are on and winners
will also lose. Time has it, that slippery
boulder. We dryly watch the pummeled swimmers,
tipping hulls, mast climbers whose misery
disciplines valor, and the sea whose beauty is rage,
though history’s losses tally on a separate page.

Matsumura Goshun, Crab (late 18th century)

Three frogs and a crab, with a handful of strokes,
and a poem on the side. The paper, too, talks
its abacus of bump and weave. Time drags
itself into the picture through nature and sands
 
we slander empty. No void in our world
for mind would dab it full, subtle cauldron.
We are the plodding and the scurrying; wet
or dry, aliens of the immediate. No life regret
 
can bend a body back to what it knew,
so the land crab lugs its armor, stews
in its heat. The frog, sleak and aberrant,
master of the world’s two selves, is tenant
 
and lord. They welcome what new confusions arise
for resignation sometimes gets the prize.

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 #125 January 2022