Spanish version

 

            The Double Rupture

 

We spill into each other suddenly-:

            rivers merging at the delta

of day and sleep, body and blouse, night

and yesterday. A residue of salt

in the pores of your temples,

my self-consciousness*

dissolves into you. Your own, your pride,

selflessly into its cradle.

            Night-:

we spill into each other suddenly.

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

Tangling like tongues\

            we inhabit the body of play.

We yield to the urge,

            the play of our bodies. Stars

of soft rope, we lash diagrams

of clinging lovers in an empty,

mythic sky; of calendar-signs enduring

without delusions of enduring;

of air and river water spilled

across the soapy shores of night,

            even if—by law—

we’re just two disruptions,

tangling like tongues.

 

*          *          *          *          *

 

                 Horses released on the paddock,

                        we sail canyons

of agoraphobia and upended 

Venus-fans, ascend the clayey heights

to a surface of disheveled cloud, and despair

how to hold

this awareness, this monument,

without withholding it, while

remembering it must be held.

            Let go. We are

horses released on the paddock

                 

Doble Ruptura: Los Cuadernos de Juan Diego Mosquera (Sección 2)

                                                

                                                         1.

 

Estrellas amarradas de soga suave, amarramos esquemas de parejas                                          en el cielo vacío de los dioses; amarramos los signos del calendario                                                      que perduran sin mentirse—nada perdura; amarramos el agua del río y el aire,                                  que se derraman sobre las orillas jabonosas de noche.                                                               Aunque—legalmente—somos una interupción, una sola ruptura, doblada.

 

                                              4.

 

Residuo de sal en los poros de tu templo, mi autoconciencia se disuelve en tí.                                     La tuya—y el orgullo—se disuelven, sin temer, ensimismadas.

 

                                                            11.

 

Nos derramos en el otro de una vez, rios que se mezclan en el delta de                                               día y sueño, cuerpo y blusa, noche y ayer. 

 

                                                            12.

 

Caballos sueltos en el prado, volamos los cañones de agorafobia                                                       y anémonas de Venus, subimos hasta las alturas de arcilla                                                                  al superficie de nubes desaliñados, y lamentamos como tener                                                           el momento y su monumento—el conciente—sin contenerlos                                                         mientras que recordamos que los hemos tenido.

 

                                                            20.

 

Enredado como lenguas, caemos al impulso de tocar el cuerpo.                                                     Habitamos el cuerpo de tocar.

 

 

 

* Beauty-modestly-aware-of-itself would better capture the original Catalán insertion

\ Also present in the word lenguas, which English cannot accommodate, is an echo of a flower, the Spanish horn (Ipomoea Hispaniola), a creeping cousin of morning glory (Ipomoea Purpurea), Milagros Mosquera’s favorite plant, and—coincidentally—named for one of Mosquera’s forbears, the botanist José María Jaramillo.

Translations and notes by Joel Whitney from The Double Rupture: The Notebooks of Juan Diego Mosquera (Vol. 2)

 

 

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