4 uruguayan poems

Images

A red chair lying next to a black one
At the foot of the sea wall. If it had eyes,
Would have seen a longtime companion,
One of its conical black legs. Drifting erratically
Away. It would also have seen a bloated fish,
The size of a frying pan, coming to rest
Beside it. Before being toyed with by the macabre tide,
Dragging it away in an imitation of life for a moment or two,
Before deploying it oncemore on the strand,
Within spitting distance of a wreath, white-flowered,
Trailing a black ribbon, meandering between
Rocks, sea and shore. Joining this idiosyncratic
Latin dance of listless objects with nothing
Better to do of a sun-scoured afternoon.


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Image

Sometime in a night so warm that it might as well be day
We drove along the Rambla to Carrasco,
A retreat for vacuous moneyed youth, deluding
Itself the world over that the impulse to escape
Significance is not a misguided quest to find it.

Between the town and Pocitos, in the dazzling shadow
Of a blackened sea, threaded with the pinhole lights
Of civilisation, we passed an open truck. Bearing
A pair of passionately entwined stowaways, young
Americans revelling in modernity; enwrapping nature
With the sensual speed of fuel-injected travel,
Allowing this in turn to charge their lust or love,
Blossoming in a private public display of narcissistic
Passion, flowering in the summer of our headlights.
We overtook and they were gone as we in turn were
Overtaken by the sensuality of night, heat and dawn.


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Hit And Run on Calle Uruguay

On a bright busy morning
A dead body lies covered
In a newly-washed sheet
People chat in doorways
Some stop to stare at the
White token of transience
Guarded by a cohort of sun-
Specced police who look important
But quite clearly are not.


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Cabo Polonio

The smell corrupts the wind which tears into my features
Distorting my face into a beaten mask. Behind which I
Cannot hide. It is the smell of rotten seal. Washed up
On the beach of Cabo Polonio, a pragmatic paradise
With room for litter, revulsion and hardship; refusing
To cocoon its visitors in a vacuum-packed ambience of
Pleasure; forcing them to seize it, greedily and guilt-
Lessly, as a right, a due of land and nature. Like death:
The skeleton debris of the world’s wasted garbage
Claims its place beside the brilliant moon, the flawless sea,
The ragged music resonating morning noon and night.



march/april 1994

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