Unshadowed
after ‘Solo for two voices’, Octavio Paz
Behind your
eyes alone
shaken seeds,
white-hot stone,
tawny wheat
daylight hardly
wakes
where nothing
moves.
Hand reaches for cup,
heard at the
back of the throat
a latch
tiempo
petrificado
flares up and dies
against the
fixed idea,
without ideas
except those felt
living the
moment words
tap on your
shoulder
“nailed to the
center
of a whirlwind” –
no one's
child,
least of all
your own, as in
“that value is
not in me”.
Shake the dry
branch:
scatter grain,
unhusked
on the heels
of a hidden sun –
the bone
raised,
flung
airy
monument
of untold
memory, future form.
Today you are
separated
by your own
voice
and others’.
Today is ice,
steam, clank, psalm,
toddler-talk,
overflow, world.
Against the
current, with it
broken bread,
an unseen drop
“girls of the
grain” in procession –
bleached
skull, seed, scream,
wandering
root in upheaved earth.
Unfound
This moment uproots another
in unblenched voice, tree-strode pitch.
Bluish gaps tear and close.
Beaks quiver to beaded view.
Gusts again and again.
Beginning End
no longer supports
wind-fingering
coral buds of grass
remnant
under our heels
passage
never closed
gleam and shadow
written in
body's reflection
from the ashes
division
without sum
air and light
is not ended
more powerfully
broken in
every atom
palimpsest of
eternal drafts
Unfound
was originally published in The Sunday Times.
Michael Lee Rattigan is a poet and translator based in Caterham, Surrey (UK). He has translated the complete collection of Fernando Pessoa's Alberto Caeiro poems (Rufus Books, 2007). His poetry collection Liminal was published in 2012 (Rufus Books). His latest collection Hiraeth was published alongside its French translation in 2016 (Black Herald Press).
