Poems

              Poems
MANOLO PADORNO
HINDÚ NEIGHBOUR
You that Uve next to my bazaar,
said the hindú shopkeeper to me the other day
you that see how crammed with things
it is —it's almost impossible to
move, I don't know now how to hang
things up—, I'm tremendously womed, he said,
about something that I'd like
you in fact to make clear to me: when
you go past the bazaar,
d'you see anything?, Everything there is?
AU I've got? By choosing me
—I thought— being you're neighbour, I said,
you want to know for sure
what you really sell:
íts sound does not correspond.
THE INDIAN MERCHANPS BAZAAR
That shop in fact
always sold something. When the town
slept it turned out that he,
the indian, would go and open up. Then
one said: a ship must have arríved.
For after a while, as expected,
taxis with tourists carne. They'd get down.
They'd enter the open bazaar
and then he'd sell them sometbing.
They, said the indian one day as
he walked along Las Canteras, buy
what they dream.
They take
what they dream: they never
see the bazaar empty:
that's my business.
INDIA, INDIA
India, India, church window that floods
only during the day, while the daytime
zodiac marked peasant sleeps, lonely
ploughs the night, sows in the dark,
scythes with open eyes, under the sun
and there at midday flows powerful
the forming stone, every day
the vessel and its metal watery
on the sea's edge that it crosses,
the bobbing branch sinks, compact
the barefooted girl drinks it,
the ray of fire gocs slow,
but its gradual pace well-endowed
with persuasión, to which carne
the surrounding moming light,
the palm grove, the beatifíc cow
(that returns), the rain spread in sheets
over the geometry of space,
the reclining table, submerged
in fermenting luke-warmness,
the object pours out its strength
to survive among the gods
of light, in the dissolved landscape
over such a long needed joumey;
that endíng hunts out
some placeless date
till meeting always, in the bay
the yellow tree open-armed
India, India, your flame was dawning.
THE WESTERNIZED HINDÚ
The westemized hindú goes and looks
at the bottom, sees it against the light,
weighs it, holds it, valúes the contents
and, professionally, pnces it.
He puts a price on the visible invisible,
he, the only one that can valué
a different, copious merchandise, souvenir
of some islands on the way to the continent.
He prices it. He knows what he's up to.-
The only one who does when he holds an
object in his hands and sees it.
He's a merchant. He knows about that
when contemplating the world, he alone
decides what the invisible is worth.
y ^\Ar
Frauk Stella. Ram Gangra. 1978. ladian Bird Series. By Kiad permission oí tbe artist.
THE HINDÚ OFFERS A DRINK
Nowadays it's known for sure
what ware is bad, that good stuff
stands out on the table,
stanng you out: a way of showing them.
The hindú knows it well. He
knows he's only got to sell
cheap puré gold, precious stone
trinkets, rose coral necklaces.
But he also knows, since always
(whether his goods are worthless or not)
that's falstr. and him its merchant too.
He opens his shop wide,
and the tourist anives in haste
to drínk up memory.
And he downs it.
THE STROLLING INDIAN
The indian that stroUs along the beach
this orange twilight has
a slow walk, is crest-fallen, far away
as if he walked elsewhere.
Where? In a never ending landscape.
A landscape with such a leafy smell
that it spills the trees leaves
as it gradually penetrates light.
The light falls on the sea and moums,
it spreads the rumour all around
cleaves the spice, pours the essences.
The indian that stroUs along the beach
retums suddenly to reality
goes down the ramp,
walks asleep, disappears.
THE INDIAN BAZAAR
In the shop there's everything: both visible
and invisible: the indian deals in it.
What is seen and unseen.
It's the hindú bazaar of Albareda Road.
When I passed it by, the indian
asked me what I saw.
The bazaar is fuU of objects,
of merchandise, but it's also empty.
It's fuU of things people
see, fancy, buy, take away.
The real object of illusion.
The indian closes his bazaar at night
and góes out for a walk along Las Canteras
(along the shore of the Ganges)
really out there.
THE SEA'S BASKET
The hindú merchant, smartened up
dressed european style, on purpose
opens the bazaar very early in the morning,
by the Mercado del Puerto. He beholds,
head on, infinity, the prolonged quay,
a huge bridge, the horizon's line,
of transparent stone,
that dawn brings ready made over the sea.
A taxi draws up; gently
a foreign couple alight:
they gaze at the objects.
First in.
This morning, they've no idea
how much the indian will knock off the pnce.
They go away taking the water
in the sea's basket.
THE SOUVENIR
The hindú traded in all goods diligently
there's nothing he won't sell in the day;
maybe it's a gleaming fish, or
a fake mother-of-pearl bird.
Shop of wonders, misty bazaar by the sea
(Under the wave), it's offering
a patient clay Buddha on the shelf;
each Ítem where it should be,
aromatic sandal wood,
rough silk, the thread should be visible.
The indian's at the door. He sees
a stray tourist, in a hurry.
He stops him; his charm takes him in:
he'll guide his future uncertainly.
THE CREMATORIUM
BY THE SEA
The hindú only sells an invisible
elephant, and framed too, next
to the cow, the fíguring cloud;
landscape emerges out of the religious river,
the crematorium, with fresh smouldering wood
already, where the dog is going to gnaw at
the remains of ashes;
erect complacent Buddha conjures
an arm out of thin air, under
the tulle (concealing essence) and
spilling annual roses opens his hand.
Cañarían hindú that walks
in the sunlight of Las Canteras, open, chisel
away the plight of kindred roses.
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THE GURÚ GOES BEYOND THE GATES
Window of many colours that slowly melts
the hindú handles it every day
on his house front, square on
with the light that moming brought.
The monastic hindú, man of lime,
head of the parrish, double lattice
of the Puerto de la luz; the coloured
glass offering disintegrates.
The Isleta lying in its low bed, port
of the Atlantic Ocean, ledge
along which people run, it shouts
silence in every comer, open to
the sea, this sea-breezy moming
the gum goes out beyond the gates.
NAKED
I {lon't know what seeing hardly at all means.
Seéing almost nothing.
Not even hearing something, seeing
something: nothing. Not even
being indian, to be from India;
to see nothing, to cleanse myself, to see
in absolute darkness
where nothing is visible, nothing
that can't be seen, emptiness
would then seem to see something, something
in the foggy river, the day
unconscious habit
Tm almost (of) that religión.
Naked. I almost see something.
Something that is invisible,
slowing coming through the shadows.
BIOBIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ON MANUEL PADORNO
Manuel Padomo was born in the Canary Islands in 1933.
Self-taught. As a writer he sets on a "new" course of lyrical
narrativity; he develops his "poetical stmctures" in analogy,
that together with precisión, "perfection" of verse and a scÉF-crítical
attitude, lead him to créate a unique and personal
oeuvre. In 1962 he is runner up to the Premio Adonais (a
national poetry prize); in 1990 he is Premio Canarias de Lite­ratura,
(Cañarían Community Literary Prize), and Premio
Nacional Pablo Iglesias in 1991. He Uves in Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria.
Published poetry: Oí crecer las palomas, 1955; A la som­bra
del mar, 1963; Pape Satán (brief anthology), 1970; Coral
Juan García, 1977; Una bebida desconocida, 1986; El náu­frago
sale (that comprises three books of poetry): Una bebi­da
desconocida (2nd Ed.), El animal perdido todavía and En
absoluta desobediencia, 1989; El hombre que llega al exterior,
1990; El nómada sale (anthology 1963-1989), 1990; Desnudo
en Punta Brava, 1990; Una aventura blanca, 1991 and Égloga
del Agua, 1991 and a 2nd Ed., in 1992, corrected and exten­ded.
Padorno, since his youth a clear exponent of the spirit of
his times, a marginal poet of Spanish literature, is a nomad
of Europe's cultural periphery. He was a member, in post-war
Cañarles, of an avant-garde group, with the painter Manolo
Millares and the Sculptor Martin Chirino; he went to Madrid
with them. From the beginning, with A la sombra del mar,
a break-through, he builds an Atlantic insular tbelos. Euro-pean,
rooted in the dimensión of myth, in the "religious"
object, and in the culture of his times; as elements the appear,
amarous and erotic desíre for an oceanic man, the metaphy-sics
of light and a determined incursión into the territory of
the invisible. A poet whose language is tense and bold, his
writing not only tells what he knows but also what he
"doesn't know, what he hasn't experienced, what he ignores,
what can't be seen". He tries to make the invisible transpa-rent,
to "extend" the reach of silence. "Poetry always tries to
leap into the void; a reasonable infinite vértigo, says the
poet", to cross the boundary. To entcr the depths, to cut
open the lucid body and go forth into the world, to reach the
other side. The exterior world. To breathe the invisible. To
know its secret. Poetry brings something diíTerent, from over
there beyond. Words that are hewn out of analogy. "To
extend silence. Something that slowly begins to be heard, to
be seen, the morning's tree of li^t, the fleshy body of
water".
Égloga del Agua, his last published book, is a good exam-.
pie of that long mental joumey, with a different visión, jubi-lant
and lithe where, in María Zambrano's words, "one can
breathe the virginal, limpid, puré waters of creation". That
great breath of joy, whose epiphany the poet records in his
notes, "The empty contcnt".
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