Tiwanaku*

Your name yellows,
darkens, and
falls—
laid waste—
at the foot of the stone.
You are now eternal death,
a figuration of time,
a death that cannot sleep.
Deep,
the stone dreams and attempts to define
you,
but the cold
seeps through your eyes,
turns that night within you; where
what grows, grows sorrowful;
your centuries, rubble;
your shadow
crumbles,
cracks
at every instant,
collapsing into dust.
Every footstep a walking
dirge
of cobwebs and storms.
The scent of death follows you:
your aged frost,
your wrinkled patience,
your circle,
your seal.

You are no more,
vanquished stone, blind,
stone of solitude,
from night to night;
your name is nothing,
subdued stone,
stone of silence,
stone.

*Tiwanaku is a Pre-Incan archaeological site in Bolivia, located on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca.

Knife Dissolving

It drops perversely
dreaming,
scratching
air, glides
cuts water
and falls,
thinks about
its fall, tries to conjure
stuffed animals,
tunnel of love nights in a lion’s den,
but drowns in the mirror, shining like
tinfoil, enveloping moons.
On the other side, hanging death
spirals slowly. Blood
fading into
the terrain.

Translator’s note:

How the knife left the page.

The poem and the trajectory of the object in it have all the momentum they need; as the Spanish original and this translation are not en face, I don’t see how mimicking its original shape on a page would serve it. I would invite the reader to come to this poem as is in English and then be the one who “understands it” (reference the poem Introduction to the Thing, below). Afterwards, the reader will be the one pleasantly surprised by the shape of the original, the conception of the form on the page, in its language by the actual poet himself. In other words, the poet wrote, dreamed it and sings it; the translator merely demonstrates how the knife left the page, and where it was buried. Let the reader that found it, then, (in a collective act I would call the archaeo-poetic) carry the knife on his person where he wishes. And let it be the reader’s blood that fades into the terrain.

Los Angeles
October 2026
J. N. C.

Introduction to the Thing

This poem
is part of a book
of which 500 copies
will be printed.
Of those 500 copies,
50 will be given away,
of which
5 will be read,
of which
only 1
will be understood.
It’s worth it.

Time of the Tree

I beheld the poem in fine tropical night.
I read my impressions by starlight
You were this thought—tree of dreams,
my machete, my serpent, my fever, my
young tiger’s heart.
When all this becomes myth, and no
one remembers your fear,
your quinine,
a tree will be a song of victory on the
horizon,
and furious southern winds will stake
this claim on the future
— my earth for this world,
in the love of nameless beings,
in your womb’s farewell:
tree, simply tree.