J. A. Peña

J. A. Peña

POEMS

J. A. Peña, born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

In 1986, J. A. Peña received the National Poetry Prize, for The Dreamed Retaliation, a collection of poems dealing with provocative philosophical issues. He has translated into Spanish poems by Vasko Popa, Wallace Stevens Mark Strand, and Ezra Pound, among others. Currently, he lives outside Charleston, West Virginia.

PARANOIA ON THE BROOKLYN TRAIN

The day suffocates, too pale.
The leaning train from Brooklyn
suffocates from so much lucidness
just like a caressed, canned dog
through the oxide of an instantaneous rain
who becomes obstinate by passing the copper
from its threads toward the light side
of the traveler.

The fog lengthens an arm toward the window
of the last boxcar.

All so pensive
and so blurred are the hurricanes;
all so wretchedly driven in order to
permit their embers to fall upon the ice.

Somebody enters a hand into my chest
and caresses my pain with cloudy gloves.

Fear blinds the glass.

The raging train continues cornered
by the rainy eyes of the traveler.
Each traveler has a fluvial
watchmaker dismantled in his smile
and has screwed a sweetness into the skull
of those who have (momentarily) suffered from epilepsy
just like the children of New York.
Epilepsy consists of washing with oil
a melodious dental box,
without forgetting to restore or to supplant
the present minute for a future hour.

We make ourselves murder through the vastness
diminished by the wired.
Out of the corner of an eye, everyone moves away
cursing the first hour...

Then, as if forgetting,
their souls bend in order to think,
but the soul has been bent too much
and so many times the semblance has been hurt
to such an elementary curvature that already
without two cards, you can pick up
their demolished smiles in the glass.

With their souls pressed into pockets
we leave walking on mud.
At what time will we exhume the steps
of the one that comes from behind
licking at the nothingness
that wrinkles like a broken handkerchief
within a gaze?

A cigarette un-draws the face in the mirror.
All mirrors imprison, without defining the scowling one
who creates and transfigures.

A world of monstrous transfigurations,
built with the pieces of a puzzle in disorder,
it is here.

Just as if the sleeping acrobat
with his flaccid premonitions
could lead
to a definitive fall,
the trains, without anyone to see them,
penetrate the air and rocks that we breathe.

The one pursued by himself
screams at me from afar:
there are two ways of retaining
and reaching:
by losing and becoming unfastened.

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