By Luis Alberto Ambroggio
Translated by Yvette Neisser Moreno

Their Dove-Song Hurts

he, whose infinite girth is encircled by midnight, noon
-Juan Ramón Jimenez

Pilot of failures and ambitions
I have come to cleave
the pure night.
The moon enticed by dusk
illuminates joy
with a full, pale face
like one in love.

Beneath the moon and sun
desires navigate in gondolas.
Love’s ghosts
do acrobatics without contours
nightingales or mornings.

Later you can hear the weightless dew
of unsleeping souls.

In the atmosphere we are kept awake by masks
that exhume cries.

Their dove-song hurts
when dusk sinks
to the bottom of the long night.

We all fly to decipher bit by bit
that perplexing color
in which we are a shadow
and a turbulent feather.

Dawn, we will disobey the sadness over our names,
and the river will be blood.
I will always bless the daybreaks with fire.
You are water and I am air in blue space.
There is no solitude or cold in our moons,
and their nights entwine us together.
I will gather you in dew, rays of light, trills of hope
and I will convince myself once more
that everything is well made.

If your feet were to tread on smoke
triumphing sadly over melancholy,
if your hands, for example, were to construct
golden palaces that vanish,
if your bread had only
the alchemy of a desire,
if your mother were an armless shadow,
your lover perhaps a dead man,
if all the days encircling you
were to shine bitterly on the ashes,
if the future of your eyes at daybreak
were tinted by the menacing half-light,
I don’t know if you would exist
or if anyone could exist in such agony.

Looking at you, looking at me,
I am convinced that no one should play with smoke.

If light, on the other hand, were to kiss us
and absorb us completely
the way lovers absorb each other
we would greet each dawn with song.

Did God create light
or did he create darkness?

Dialogue

for Moraima Semprún de Donahue

I know how it hurts to be tortured by words,
        to use them, to live insufficiently in their weak outlines,
        to want to eat them again, convinced they will taste of needles.

I could organize a congress of happy verses in some useless paradise
        to create another madness
        or the perfect torment.

I would feel fulfilled if I could write silence,
        fill the furrow of sentences with a bloody river,
        grow a tree of letters
        that keep changing colors until they die,
        or capture love in a paragraph
        with only periods and commas, between unbroken parentheses,
        with capital letters,
        without substituting the page for the bodies.

If words were actually eyes,
        or anatomies in search of orgasm,
        I would not be afflicted by the Machiavellian lie.

Words with their humble, contagious dance
        breed terrifying virtues.
        Crucifixion is one of their punishments.

I cannot be the word nor cease being it.
        We embody a shared misery.

<Luis Alberto Ambroggio's Bio> <Yvette Neisser Moreno's Bio>

Programs in Creative Writing and Translation     ■     Department of English     ■     University of Arkansas      ■     Fayetteville