Leaving the Atocha Station

On these days I worked on what I called translation. I opened the Lorca more or less at random, transcribed the English recto onto a page of my first notebook, and began to make changes, replacing a word with whatever word I first associated with it and/or scrambling the order of the lines, and then I made whatever changes these changes suggested to me. Or I looked up the Spanish word for the English word I wanted to replace, and then replaced that word with an English word that approximated its sound (“Under the arc of the sky” became “Under the arc of the cielo,” which became “Under the arc of the cello”). I then braided fragments of the prose I kept in my second notebook with the translations I had thus produced (“Under the arc of the cello / I open the Lorca at random,” and so on).

You have outgrown poetry.

Meanwhile, life’s white machine.

Under the water / the words go on.

Over the course of my research, I’d lost considerable weight. Other than that, I didn’t think I’d undergone much change.

If I was nervous, it was only about the fact that I wasn’t nervous, which might mean something was wrong with me.

Arturo appeared at the podium and began to speak. Night-blooming flowers refused to open near the stadium lights. Freedom was on the march. Aircraft noise was having strange effects on finches. Some species synchronized their flashes, sometimes across thousands of insects, exacerbating contradictions. Why was I born between mirrors?

Fuck you, I said to the cat, who was blinking its knowing blink.

I would never live away from my family and language permanently, even if I could work out the logistics, and since I knew that to be the case, I should depart at the conclusion of my fellowship, quit smoking, and renew contact with the reality of my life; that would be best for me and my poetry.

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.