Eduardo Escalante – Four Poems

A rehearsal of signs

A delicate semi-open window,
stories on the street spiral.
                                                               
You are seeking
carefully
trying to decipher things
if possible,
piece by piece, to a final profile

The thick reissuing of shapes
trees, cars, people dresses …
the thousand forms that move

Everything, at some point,
as whipped by brambles
When picking pine nuts in the forest
and you can feel by instinct the distance

Again, in a lower or higher pitch
you realize loneliness between a breath
and a breath
a tense touch-sensitive heart

You slowly come to sense
a knock at your door,
Something big is going on,
cool to the touch, swaying
in his good promises.
Answer back:
“Do not go so fast”.

A kind of order

Each image
a sign of the kaleidoscope
cosmic sorter

I’m going to flicker for a moment
and scrutinize
the gist of each one

I listen to
the reverberating resonance:
distant sounds of
carved glass
and the light of
warm-red florets
in the garden
cells and pores and water-rods
the ringing of fingers along the petals
plum sunset

I try to
outstrip the collection
without a sense
I’m moving away
from the anarchies that sleep in
an overabundance

Drunken in blindness
there is no guiding light
except for fever dazzle

It is a generous pleasure
if we’re awake and
talk about
missing things on the
way to where
we lost them

We hardly know this
often we shuffle overhead
only a piece of
a thin partition

Not a strange grammar

Going through
the streets
covered with leaves
near the morning markets
where hundreds of voices sing,
between thick sidewalks
papers and cartons of
sweets and sandwiches

The air beats
a long story to the bottom
every sunrise has
its own sun and moon
each ray draws
high or low tones

A delicate window
all over the scene
in search of a destination

It isn’t
photographic landscape
or watercolor
but deep waters

The pendulum of life
which laughs and cries
as the sun goes
orange or gray

Everything is weighed
on the back.
Everything is born in
the heart as from nothing

An entire bow breaks
an arrow shot
against the wind
it tries to supplant
life from its center

comprehension
burst its container

Personal Shapes
 
It is not the story of a fall
but a whole series of endurable things.
There are some prairies,
not fields of gold, some dust,
Half-moon, no galaxy, but deep crave,
I have opened my head to the wind,
as a finite being.
 
The catalog:
 
the blinks to break the spell of daylight,
the rubble of what I’ve known was true,
a hand to dig and get the ripening grain,
what was ruined made wondrous again,
the things breaking out of their mass grave,
feel by instinct the distance,
not win peace by submission.
 
In memory, things happen for the second time,
for the third time.
These are the different lines I breath.
All of which I found on a scrap heap,
in the darkness, rising through my mind
but never easy
but never easy
appearing,
a first line
and then another

Eduardo Escalante, writer and researcher living in Valparaíso, Chile; publish regularly in Hispanic Reviews (Signum Nous, Ariadna, Nagari, Espacio Luke, Lakuma Pusaki, Aurora Boreal, among others) and actually is also publishing in Slamchop, Writer Resist, Constellations, Glass Kite Anthology (forthcoming), Adelaide Literary Magazine and, in Gramma Poetry.