RSSAsimetría y Ángeles: Rafael Pérez Estrada
Apr 15
Poetry, Reading, Writing devorada por la luna, hands that fly away and living books, my most favoritest poet ever No Comments
I don’t like to name favorites of anything, not books or movies or songs or pairs of shoes or hair colors. I can’t ever pick just one. But I have to admit that if I was stranded on a desert island/moving to the moon/running out of my burning house and I had to pick just one book of poetry to take with me, it would be Devoured by the Moon by Rafael Pérez Estrada. I’ve dogeared this book, it’s sprouting rumpled post-it notes, it’s pages are getting wrinkled and worn where I’ve curled it in on itself, and it’s spotted with various shades of blue, black, and gray where I’ve made notes or underlined my favorite stanzas or phrases.
To look at it, you would never know it was something special. The book is a plain perfect bound and the design is, to be generous, not exactly impressive. The cover features a man wearing thick plastic glasses in a suit and tie. He has obvious patches of gray at his temples and his face, thought not fat, is fleshy. It’s hard to believe that such a man wrote such wonderful poems.
Without further ado, here are some samples:
From “De la Naturaleza de los Ángeles/On Being an Angel,” a list poem:
“Los ángeles de la noche americana se adornan con alas de neón. . . . Espera el ángel su resurección en forma de papagayo.”
“At night, American angels adorn their wings with neon. . . . Angels hope to be reincarnated as parrots.”
From “Crónica de la Lluvia/Chronicle of the Rain,” another list poem:
“Nunca escribas estas palabras en una misma línea: tigre y paloma, pues es fácil que la primera devore a la segunda.”
“Never write the words “tiger” and “dove” in the same line, for the first may devour the second.”
From “Cierta Asimetría/A Certain Asymmetry,” a prose poem:
“Una tarde me habló de la nube, y no quise creerla hasta que me condujo a una habitación destartalada, luego, abrió el espejo de doble luna y me la eseñó. Allí, en la obscuridad del armario, apretujada entre las perchas de madera y la ropa inservible, estaba quietecita la nube. ‘Si quiero llueve,’ me explicó con la fatuidad de un domador de circo; incluso hizo una reverencia, tal si esperase un aplauso.”
“One afternoon she told me about the cloud. I didn’t want to believe her until she led me to the disheveled room, opened up the double mirror, and showed it to me. There, in the darkness of the armoire, squeezed between the wooden hangers and useless clothes, was a quiet little cloud. ‘If I want it to, it rains,’ she explained, as self-assured as a lion tamer at a circus. She even bowed, as if expecting applause.”
You can read a few more of his poems here.