Poemas originales en inglés: Jude Nutter

Nuestros lectores podrán leer las versiones traducidas al español por Silvia Camerotto en la sección Traductores de la edición papel del número 9 de La balandra.

Field Notes: Watching the Crew of Atlantis Renovating the Hubble Telescope

What comforts me most is imagining the regular, calm draw
and blow of their breathing, and that they are floating,
for a while, in exile

and surviving, because, after weeks of drifting, tethered
to a machine the size of tea trolley that pulled in
the room’s ambient air, compressed it
and vented off its nitrogen with such a quiet, relentless
suck and surge, my mother had crossed
into the homeland no one is equipped to travel through. Tethered

securely, and laden with tools
and equipment, the astronauts bury their arms,
elbow-deep, into the golden torso
of the telescope. Beneath them, across the earth,
night’s precise curve approaching and nothing
around them but the constant
wash of their own breathing. What I remember most

about my mother’s last breath was the way her eyes
opened slightly—slim buttonholes
in the body’s fabric—and my father rising
out of his chair and leaning over
the bed’s chrome railing to get as close
to her as he could, to rest his forehead against hers
and whisper hello, Eileen, and I found myself thinking

about that white and half-wild pony
in the pasture next door; the way, each morning,
it was a solid, pale patience behind a single
strand of fence wire as it waited for my father
to trail through the damp nap of the lawn
with his small offering; the way it would lower
its head, then, to press against him, with such
restraint, the long, heavy treasure of its skull.
The thick plate of the forehead. Each nostril’s
soft cuff. But it was over

already and that machine went on breathing
without her until I rocked its small, red switch
into silence. There was the fixed curve
of my father’s spine. There was the still weight
of his head against hers. Our first night on earth
without her. Wind in the hawthorn.
The great carnival wheel of stars. The astronauts

are repairing the gyros; they are fitting the spectrograph
and the wide-field cameras that will allow us to gaze
right onto to the cosmic frontier. And the undertaker unzipped the dark

bloom of his body bag. Later, the froth
of the first birds and the lights of the fleet roped
three deep along the quay fraying
in a dawn that arrived like wood smoke and,
for a while, my father and I not knowing how
to be with each other. With their gentle

and deliberate gestures the two astronauts
appear almost tender, like lovers.
The visors of their helmets are golden
blisters of reflected light. It is impossible to gauge
the ferocity of thought inside them.

Permission

An egg, after all, is a beautiful thing long
before it’s a metaphor for the perils of this world,
so how this is meant to dissuade
them from sex, or even love, is a mystery, and yet
they sashay through the halls all day with their small burdens,
which they wrap in scarves and T-shirts, and pack,
in pairs, inside baskets and tins. A broken egg,

they are told, means a broken child, even though,
in real life, the body is more durable
than we dare think. So this
is the burden of the future, and who
among them is truly equipped to bear it.
Imagine, I say, what it might be like
inside an egg, and they picture rooms shut tight
against the weather —outside, rain
and wind with such distance
inside their talking. Surely, someone argues,
a broken egg’s more fitting since the future is mostly

emptiness and loss, and I
want to tell them how my mother
once took me out to the barn and lifted,
from the golden curdle beneath the heat lamps,
a single chick, which she placed in my palm
so I might discover, when it mattered most,
that an egg weighs more than the small
bird breaking from it. If this would help them,
I can’t say, but I know a burden
need never be as heavy as we first believe.
But they care so little for the past, and because
the future is, mostly, emptiness and loss, we hike
to the wooded border of the playing field
where the jackdaws nest, where they place down
and so forget their baskets and tins, searching
instead for the empty eggs, tipped from the nest
and scattered like tiny, overturned buckets
among the shepherd’s purse and the vetch.

It begins to rain. In the building across the field
someone is flicking lights on against the storm.
Tins and baskets lie abandoned
in the grass and the jackdaws are calling loss, loss,
from the high, green darkness of the beeches;
and there, beneath them, a girl
and a boy stand waiting inside the noise of the falling rain:
she has noticed how the small flies gather
beneath the trees in a storm because she is looking
upward and pointing toward the green
undercarriage of leaves; and this boy, who has waited
longer than even he can remember, moves

up behind her to lift, and then place his lips against,
the tip of her long, dark braid. And it was Proust,
wasn’t it, who implored us to remember
that a kiss is the one thing that gives the heart leave
to accompany the body forward. It’s gestures
like this that win the attention of the gods.
But still it might not save them:
think of how the hopeful and the hopeless alike
no doubt kiss, for luck, before ascending, the first rung
of the ladder that will take them closer to heaven.

(Poemas pertenecientes al libro The Curator of silence, University of Notre Dame Press, 2006)