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.