Elsa Cross's Selected Poems, third selection

NB: Some of the spacing is incorrect as it could not be replicated.

Intact, we rose to love one another

while death sang at our side.

last lines of "Tenayuca" (tr. John Oliver Simon)

Now, in this time,

as unlucky days return

I break my dreams like clay jars....

from "Malinalco" (tr. John Oliver Simon)

her shackled tongue sleeps

feigns that it sleeps

stretches into its fullness

savours its own darkness

from "Cantharides" (tr. Ruth Fainlight)

With its blackened heraldry,

its relentless downpours,

the city is dying.

Around the fountain

young people shoot up,

sleep on paving slabs

with runes drawn

on their shoulders.

* * *

Close-up

only on sweaty faces,

twitching hands.

The perfect illusion shifts elsewhere,

oppressive.

A foreign dialect

with no wish to express

quite simply brings

its clean edge.

opening and closing lines of "Tattoos" (tr. Anamaria Crowe Serrano)

Night accumulated on the walls.

* * *

Oh long kisses,

hand that travels a thigh

like a beach,

the curl in the groin--

(oh summer body).

And thoughts pause

in that flowering

like insects.

from "Reflection in a Sphere" (tr. Anamaria Crowe Serrano)

The touch of day

and the cloud of dreaming

longingly

skirt each other.

And deep down

like a cloyed fish

lies consciousness.

Its intimate calm

unbuckles into arborescent light....

* * *

The heat holds up a taut arch mid-way through the day.

* * *

The heat draws its pincers closer, like a crab.

* * *

A transversal cut through meaning.

We look at the oracle, none the wiser.

Everything begins where we close our eyes.

* * *

You can hear the east wind,

the metal of cowbells,

cicadas:

the incipient polyphony of summer.

* * *

And at night, where will clarity suggest itself?

A wave in the sea

where the moon instils its desire?

* * *

Under the shade of the palm tree,

on the banks of the dry lagoon

as much sediment gets superimposed

on stones

as on the mind--

creatures of thought

or desire,

--who engenders them?

which all-fertile god germinates the tiniest impulse,

the most trivial fantasy,

as he goes by,

and turns them

into dark or radiant beings,

whose beauty overwhelms?

* * *

Desires become bright stones,

seeds devoured by birds,

or in the dark they spread their emptiness.

The moon flutters like an insect,

pulsates

in spirals over the water

and flush with visible things,

in the fissure,

it grows toward a more confined

recess of consciousness.

from "Stones" (tr. Anamaria Crowe Serrano)

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems were published by Shearsman and can be purchased delivery-free from The Book Depository.

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems, second selection

Translations by Michael Smith and Luis Ingelmo


You answer through silence.
You reduce thought
to the void,
and there where you razed all image
your name is renewed.

last stanza of "Name"

Where can I fall where you are not?

last line of "A Tightrope Act"

The ends of the earth
at the tips of your tangled hair.

last stanza of "Dancing Shiva"

My senses dissolve in this wordless sea,
words become quiet,
and one step further on the mind opens up
to the shock of its own annulment.

...

Present in everything
thus you also disappear.

...

Where are you leading me
stripped of my own body?

...

And what of Death?
Small butterflies flying among the ruins.

...

Froth leaves necklaces around the throat of rocks.
Islands of black rock.
Terns nest in the porous walls.
A necklace of froth--and I see my own wreck.
Night comes and shuts off the shine on the water.
Come, you tell me.
With closed eyes, just the tumble of the sea.
Still very close
those beaches to which I will never return.
Very far away now.

...

Black light devouring our bodies.

...

And on the water,
where rays freeze in their own light,
I see you like a seed of fire.
Every wave leaves trails of silk against the sun.

from "Malabar Canto"

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems is published by Shearsman Books and can be purchased online here at The Book Depository, which offers free worldwide delivery on all their books.

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems, first selection

Mexican poet Elsa Cross, as translated by Michael Smith and Luis Ingelmo

Bacchantes

At every entrance of that village, a church.

The seven doors protected by the archangels, so they said.

And ours got drunk in the arcades of the square,

talking of heaven and hell

as placed separated by two inches

inside the body.

last lines of II

We forgot to mind our children,

like Bacchantes,

we forgot our homes.

The rain was a fiesta on the mountain.

And who could predict his own fulmination?

from IV

...pianos stumbling in an out-of-tune waltz.

* * *

We became deer,

we crossed through the woods like arrows.

from VI

Pleasure lashed us.

Inexhaustible,

inebriated,

our bodies, the offering,

like fruits that women leave

on the beaches of the south and the sea carries away.

We were lost to the world.

We sketched boats in the air

and we went off in them.

from VII

Your eyes, emerged from what blaze,

from what sombre places,

saw without seeing the plates of food.

from VIII

Unceasing celebration,

at the cost of so much of our life,

our faces so pale.

* * *

And who could stop us?

Who could stop

those plants climbing along the wall?

from X

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems has recently been published by Shearsman and can be purchased here.