Chad Sweeney
from the Translator’s note
Little is known about the life of Juan Sweeney de las Minas de Cobre. He grew up between Andalusia, Ireland, Oklahoma and Bolivia, lived centuries ago and has yet to be born. Vicente Huidobro wrote in a letter to Sweeney, “Reading these poems, one desires annihilation and love in equal measures. One tastes metal, as of an asteroid belt of old trains passing overhead.” Juan Sweeney preferred riding on the backs of trains to being seated inside; he loved cheese and whiskey and has often been compared to the troubadour poet, Cavalcanti, for his lifestyle of iconoclasm and intrigues with women of court. From what can be gathered, Sweeney’s books included Instructions to My Translator, Wet Book of the Otter, The Iconoclast’s Secret Window, and Shouts from the Copper Mines. All that remains of Sweeney’s production are the fragments contained here. Nearing the time of Sweeney’s disappearance, he burned all personal copies of his books, and in the years following, his books were mysteriously removed from the world’s major libraries. Sweeney famously claimed that he thought in English but wrote in Spanish, so that the executioners of the Inquisition and the future fascists of the Spanish Civil War would “choke to death” on his poems. For this reason, I have committed to translating Juan Sweeney’s poems back into English, the language of his thoughts. Admittedly, I do not like his poetry much and have tried to improve on it when possible.
22.
I’m sad today
for everyone who will die,
one third by plague,
one third by famine,
but each an individual terror,
a last wet blinking
of the iris,
one third by war, one third by
suicide,
and one third
for lack of imagination.
I’ve been accused of egotism—
yes, well, look at these feet of mine!
Even my bloodshot eye is
prophecy.
I can feel the dead
passing into the earth.
My ribs come down
to wrap them
protectively, paternally.
There’s a fox’s shadow up ahead
on the road, but the fox is
nowhere in sight.
24.
The sky was busy with angels and martyrs.
The sky foamed like sheep’s blood
poured over ivory. All eyes
were on the tight rope walker
balanced between two towers,
the show-off son of a bitch,
his little toes pointed like rats!
No one noticed me grab the rope
to shake him out of his silhouette.
No sooner had I touched it
than it was I teetering on the rope,
and he was my killer.
To confuse the crowd I fell up
into legend,
adding one letter to the alphabet.
25.
I think in English but I speak in Spanish.
I smoke in Catalan but I dream in French.
The spaces between languages
are the spaces between pine needles.
From the wolves I learned love.
From the stars I learned forgetting.
I drink in Gaelic but I kiss in Portuguese.
I bargain in Greek but I curse in Russian.
The space between catalpa leaves
is the first forest. The space between
languages is the true language.
From the mockingbird I learned to listen.
From the ox I learned patience.
No, I never learned patience.
39.
All its silver mines in disrepair, tonight,
its canyons filling with the cries
of extinct birds,
the moon
hangs bracelets of thin light
in the mangroves,
traces circles on the waters
like a distracted widow.
My skeleton is exactly the right size
for my body. My skeleton
follows me everywhere
like an old dog.
I know a tailor who stitches love letters
onto the bottoms of her feet.
I know a man who collects illnesses
as one would collect river stones.
A rash beneath his collar wilts and blooms.
He wears a sweater on the inside
to keep his kidneys warm.
41.
The grass has asked too little of me
in this life. Clouds over Montserrat,
faceted like blue topaz,
have not sought my origins.
And even while making love to me,
though you come like an earthquake
that shakes the dahlias and the skulls
in the gardens,
you leave my doors unlocked—
you do not force them open
to find an orphan swaddled in snow
to find the king of field mice
presiding at funerals.
Perhaps I’ve not loved you
well enough. Perhaps, I’ve been too busy
with my little ironies.
But the Landlord is coughing at the window,
and the shadow of a sickly fig tree
grows long and dry across the floor,
so I must pursue you
even into memory,
even into language.
43.
Leeches gather in patches of shade
to drink blood from the walls
of the house.
Unbelievable! This old house
has more blood in it than an elephant!
I grit my teeth and lift
with my whole weight up
and out of my taxonomy.
I sip from my sorrow
in secret
when the town props
are in for repair.
Questions sprout at the borders of light,
black orchids, white turtles,
but the questions aren’t about me,
my face of a green painting with seven eyes,
cubist self-portrait in a future of machines.
The snow is falling
and its falling is falling
making a forest of the air
vertical meadow
where oxygen bulges among thistle down.
Every so often I forget to be afraid.
55.
Then my green old couch drifts out
the window and into the market
where a goat is masticating
a blind man’s apples, the Count
buys wigs for his nephew, Pietro,
and the mayor is pick-pocketing
a pilgrim returned from Canterbury.
Oh, please, all of you,
come back from Canterbury!
St. Peter’s bones have been sold!
The factory that made the bones
has been sold—the factory’s owner,
a hunger artist from Gdansk,
has been sold.
The dogs, set loose at last,
are hunting their ancestral master
tracking his footprints back
through millennia, through the pastures
of Ilium and the red tassels of wheat.
But the dogs are much older
than he is, there is
no such master.
H_NGM_N