Poetry |

“Canticle of the New Order”

Canticle of the New Order

 

At first I wandered the streets

of Manhattan

till my feet gave out and my mind

sprang loose

by Grant’s tomb

I looked across the river

to New Jersey and heard the call

of Catholic bells

(clang and taint of faith)

ate mangoes

in East Harlem a pizza slice

on 14th Street

(oh universal wedge of taste)

and found the kindling

of a fire about to burst

from the bush of love’s perdition

to the very heart of the new order.

 

*

 

Under the moon the fields

are the color of my mother’s

breast when she

was a young woman in love

her touch like the flow

of water over stone

the river turning

silver into foam

the bank brown slate

sky mottled

into yellow husk

across the road the pines

sway like the earth’s bones.

 

This was my last

experiment in solitude

by the river in the woods

what I did

what I failed to do

volví a La Habana

la vi como respiración

(I returned to the city of birth)

like breath

a curl in lost time

bucle del tiempo perdido

paulatinamente pablo

repentinamente cuerdo

slowly pablo suddenly sane.

 

*

 

The river is long soup

unchartable as your voice

high sometimes

fast and churning

or dense and slow your foot

making its way up my thigh

el río negro como la brea

tar river of childhood

how can full be empty

and empty full

no hay nada más cierto

que la incertidumbre

nothing is more certain

than uncertainty

te vi delgada y límpida

ángel callejera

I saw you thin I saw you

clean I fell in love

llevo esa pena

en mis venas

decked out pushed out

street angel left for dead

I curried favor not with kings

but with the kinks and flings

of sameness and dissent

I went at night

to the streets of bored hordes

the painted women

sniffing powder with smeared men

jittery boys who looked

but didn’t make it home

before dawn llegué

al amanecer with torn shirt

stained pants and twenty

cents in my pocket

if you spend

don’t spend halfway

if you make mistakes

let them come in waves

in cookie trays champagne

glasses music boxes

unmade beds

over the water

the mist gathers slowly

the sun breaks like an egg

and spills through the woods

the black telephone of longing rings

no one answers

the lamb is brought to the sacrifice

la fiesta termina en el mar

the festival ends in the sea.

Contributor
Pablo Medina

Pablo Medina is the author of nine collections of poetry in English and Spanish, most recently The Foreigner”s Song: New and Selected Poems (2020, Tiger Bark Press). He is on faculty at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and lives in southern Vermont.

Posted in Poetry

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