PERUVIAN SHADES OF POETRY – Blanca Varela

Her mother was a composer who authored many famous creole waltzes. She, Blanca Varela, was born in Lima in a 1926 Summer day. In 1949 they travelled to Paris where she met Octavio Paz, a key figure in her life, who introduced her to the artists and intellectuals there. Octavio Paz (the Mexican Nobel Laureate), praised her poetry and identified one of her gifts as knowing when to be silent if it is time not to write. Her poems are surrealist, in the way that they try to express the world in an innocent way from the inner space’s point of view, yet they cannot prevent cruelty from coming into them from the outside world. Varela’s poems often seem to be about the act of writing itself. Important aspects of her work are her use of irony; the affinity her poems have with painting; and her refusal to see herself as a social poet.

I GO BODILESS – I go bodiless from the sun to the shady, water music of living shadow through the narrowing vagina, which guides me from blindness to light, under the high echoing dome in this colossal semblance of a nest. I touch the sea belly with my belly, I inspect my body meticulously poke at my feelings. I am alive.

DISTANT YET NEVER SO CLOSE – Distantyet never so close, we walk a sinking earth, lying down on her or simply standing, we feel the bucking of time it’s not about fearful flames, nor ungovernable seas on this earth mind and body, have the same ebb and flow, in the air that lacks weight, since nothing differs in memory, from what we have seen or imagined. We dream as we live, waiting without certainty or science, the only thing we suspect beyond question, the last chord in this vague music which envelops us. Sometimes doubt explicit as a flower, persuades us with petals and signs, to swirl on our axis, to thirst stained with ink to drink imagined lips, from the oldest and most mortal wineskin. The sky would be a dark place a space of light, in the eye that looks at itself, in the hand that closes, to clutch hold of itself out in the immense open. When all’s said and done like the one who closes the coffin, or a letter a ray of sunlight, will rise up like a sword to blind us, and gradually open the darkness, like an unexpectedly wounded fruit, like a door which hides nothing, and guards nothing more.

FAMILY SECRET – I dreamed of a dog, a skinned dog, its body sang its red body whistled. I asked the other one, the one who turns out the light the butcher, what has happened why are we in the dark. This is a dream you are alone, there is no one else, light does not exist, you are the dog you are the flower which barks, sharpen your tongue sweetly, your sweet black four-legged tongue. Dreams scorch the skin of man, human skin burns disappears, only the mutt’s red pulp is clean, the true light dwells in the crust of its eyes. You are the dog, you are the skinned mongrel every night, dream of yourself and let that be enough.

https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Book-Latin-American-Poetry/dp/0195124545