Traducción de Claudia Keelan por Christopher Perkins

TACTICAL


You wanted me for my noun and then you wanted me general.
Militarily, but without the movement towards
the Front: mostly Western, saleable, over.
Inside history.
As sex stops thought
of sex and thought
stops fact of mind:
They were engaged.
I, on the other hand, was peopled by absence.
Agamemnon was dead. Another tried
but he was not Ulysses
and when he cried on a street in Sarajevo
counting the bodies of the dead
a Front in me Grew a face,
carried a sign:
No passengers.
Lose. From every stone, Lose.
All that evocation. You who have not known
marriage, the terror of good fortune: stop searching forever
happiness is just next to you.
Writing began with counting,
a scribe numbering life, refusing objects and names.







TÁCTICO


Me querías por mi sustantivo y luego me querías general.
Militarmente, pero sin el movimiento adelante
el Frente: sobre todo Occidente, vendible, terminado.
En la historia.
Como el sexo impide el pensamiento
del sexo y pensamiento
impide el hecho de mente:
Estaban comprometidos.
Yo, por otro lado, estaba poblado por ausencia.
Agamenón estaba muerto. Otro intentó
pero no fue Ulises
y cuando lloró en una calle de Sarajevo
contando los cuerpos de los muertos
un Frente en mí Creció una cara,
llevaba una señal:
Sin pasajeros.
Perder. De cada piedra, Pierde.
Toda aquella evocación. Tú que no has conocido
matrimonio, el terror de la buena fortuna: deja de buscar por siempre
la felicidad está justo a tu lado.
La escritura comenzó con el conteo,
un escriba numerando vida, rechazando objetos y nombres.







Claudia Keelan is the author of eight collections of poetry: We Step into the Sea: New and
Selected Poems (Barrow Street, 2018), O, Heart (Barrow Street, 2014); Missing Her (New Issues
Press, 2009); The Devotion Field (Alice James Books, 2004); Of & Among There Was a
Locus(t) (Ashata Press, 2003); Utopic (Alice James Books, 2000), which won the Beatrice
Hawley Award; The Secularist (University of Georgia Press, 1997), and Refinery (Cleveland
State University Press, 1994). Her honors include the Cleveland State University Poetry Prize
and the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series Award. Keelan teaches at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and is the editor of Interim. She lives in the Mojave Desert.