Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Fecha de nacimiento: 1974, Nueva York, Nueva York, Estados Unidos
Educación: Universidad Brown (2003)
Premios: Beca Guggenheim en Artes Creativas, Estados Unidos y Canadá
Nominaciones: NAACP Image Award a la Mejor Obra Literaria – Poesía
Poeta, ensayista y traductor. Su libro The Ground ganó el Premio de Poesía Nuevos Escritores de la GLCA. Entre otros libros de su autoría están When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness y una traducción del catalán de Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth de Salvador Espriu. Phillips ha enseñado en Harvard y Columbia y actualmente es Profesor Asociado de Inglés en la Universidad Stony Brook, donde dirige el Centro de Poesía. Ha ganado el 2013 PEN Joyce Osterweil Award de poesía.
traducción de Ezequiel Zaidenwerg
A UN VIEJO AMIGO EN PARÍS
Yo nunca vi al fantasma de tu madre.
Pero vi tus poemas acerca del fantasma
de tu madre, rozándote al pasar
a la vera del Sena, y lo vi en Linda Gregerson,
o en las acciones invisibles que alientan esos poemas
sobre el fantasma de tu madre, aquel escalofrío
al escribir, que se marchita y se transforma en algo
dúctil, y las palabras para hablar del tiempo
se tiñen de repente de lavanda y sal, y los cortes de verso
ásperos se apaciguan, el poema se abre
como una oreja que se apoya sobre
la fría puerta de una caja fuerte, hasta oír el chasquido.
Aun cuando es de día en una cueva oscura, la oscuridad persiste.
Y así, la única forma de encontrar una certeza
es entornar los ojos y tantear.
LUCAS Y MARK
Estoy sentado, apretujado, entre dos obras de Chuck Close:
“Lucas” sin luces, hecho con unos puntos gruesos
que se recortan sobre un fondo de colores oscuros,
su pelo desprolijo, su barba desprolija, su mirada desprolija
que se proyecta más allá del banco que hay entre él y “Mark”.
Nunca se ha visto a nadie en el Met más deseoso
de estar allí que “Mark”. Cada uno de sus poros
y cada raspadura que se hizo al afeitarse cobran vida.
Su sonrisa de dientes de conejo, sus hombros y su cuello
fuera de foco tienen en común
el chiste recurrente de mostrarnos las cosas como son.
Al igual que a Buscemi, es imposible mirarlo y no quererlo.
Sus anteojos de plástico barato reflejan unas luces
que él solo puede ver. En grupitos de dos
o tres, la gente posa con la cabeza colosal
de Mark: las chicas italianas de piel anaranjada
con sus vestidos caros de campesinas
hacen el signo de la paz y luego
le tiran besos. Mientras tanto, Lucas,
solito en su rincón, donde a lo lejos
es real, no el manojo enloquecido
de píxeles que muestra ser de cerca, baja los ojos
hacia mí, como si percibiera que lo estoy mirando,
con la esperanza de que me dé cuenta
de que es un hombre de verdad.
EL PRIMUM MOBILE
Oh tierra de un solo árbol, tierra de un Oh rotundo,
que filtra los afectos fugitivos en el fuego primigenio,
mientras que yo, el poeta Rowan, laureado de cenizas
y nidos de aves fénix, no llego a conocerte.
Little Song
Both guitars run trebly. One noodles
Over a groove. The other slushes chords.
Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.
They close my eyes. I close their eyes. A horn
Blares its inner air to brass. A girl shakes
Her ass. Some dude does the same. The music’s
Gone moot. Who doesn’t love it when the bass
Doesn’t hide? When you can feel the trumpet peel
Old oil and spit from deep down the empty
Pit of a note or none or few? So don’t
Give up on it yet: the scenario.
You know that it’s just as tired of you
As you are of it. Still, there’s much more to it
Than that. It does not not get you quite wrong.
The Beatitudes of Malibu
I
Walking across the PCH, we looked
Up and saw, big as the butt of a pen,
Jupiter, fat with light and unheighted.
I looked back at the waiting traffic stalled
At the seaside road’s salt-rimmed traffic lights
As they swayed to the Pacific’s not-quite-
Anapestic song of sea and air —
The raw and sudden crick of crickets —
The cars, suddenly silent as cows —
And blue Malibu blackening like a bee.
II
A poem is a view of the Pacific
And the Pacific, and the Pacific
Taking in its view of the Pacific,
And the Pacific as the Pacific
(Just like that: as though there’s no Pacific)
Ends. A poem is the palm of the ocean,
Closing. It or she or he is merely,
Which means it or she or he is a mar.
But a mar made up of temperament and
Tempo — the red weather in the heart.
III
I’m about to get this all wrong, I know:
Santa Monica behind me, the ocean
To my left, Jupiter high above me,
And Malibu somewhere in my mind, flecked
With mist and dusk and Dylan and strange grays
In the sunsets that stripe the seaside hills
Like the tricolor of a country made
Of beauty, the dream of beauty, and smog.
Sadly, in my mind it’s always snowing;
Which is beautiful but austere, unlike here.
IV
Along the thin pedestrian passage
Beside the PCH, just off Sunset,
Mel Gibson chants of beginnings and ends
And lies and facts — Jews and Blacks being
Both the lies and facts. His face is ruddy
Like bruschetta. He storms at the police
Because fuck them. He’s wearing his T-shirt
Like a toga. He schools them his toga
Wisdom from toga times. He offers them
His toga. They offer him a ride — .
V
Arun’s car carried us like metaphor
In a poem or painting; moving meaning;
Moving the current; being the current;
The terse tug of tides: still the great glamour;
Still, even as we speed on the 110,
The music in my head, the Jupiter
Of the mind’s unstemmed Pacific Ocean
As it unfurls in the vapor trail of
Malibu, fragrant in far-off fluorescents,
Like a nocturnal flower calling you.
VI
Then, Downtown LA and LA Live surged
Up, like marginalia on a newly
Turned page, spangled with bland suggestions,
Fiery accusations of its own
Brilliance that descend into indifference.
We speed nearer and it grows. We veer and
It grows. We park and it grows. Close your eyes.
Now look. And it has grown. Yo la quiero.
But I should know better, if just because
You can smell the injustice in the air.
VII
The Pacific encircles me. Slowly.
As though it doesn’t trust me. Or, better
Said, I only understand it this way:
By feeling like a stranger at its blue
Door. The poet with the sea stuck in his
Enjambments can’t call out to some Cathay
As though some Cathay exists and be glad.
No, the differences we have should be felt
And made, through that feeling, an eclipsed lack;
A power to take in what you can’t take back.
VIII
The old hocus of this ocean’s focus
On pulling its waves over the soft surf
Like a skin pulled down tight over the top
Of a drum was, to her, a new hocus.
We stared out with her, out toward Hokusai’s
Tiny boats and rising lace-fringed sea swells
No chunk of haiku could think to charter.
It was like the eighth day of creation
In the eighth line of a poem — she sang,
She didn’t sing, the sea sang, then stopped.
.