Juan Lamillar
trans. by Don Bogen
THREE POEMS
Everyday Objects
Only everyday objects exist:
they are the things that free us from death,
the ones most firm in laying out the borders
between reality and the fictitious.
They are temples set up against time,
and, in their fragility, they prevail.
Blue ceramic ink bottles,
old fountain pens, Venetian boxes,
watches that will deny the passing hours.
Only this exists: what stays with me
in the particular magic of this room.
Books and letters, music, photographs.
Only this exists—the window lies.
Names for time
One of these is light. Another height.
Another is the certainty of death.
It’s also the dark pendulum pointing out
the weakness in the structures we erect.
We do not know its silent, changing face.
Its name is our astonishment at life.
While we are captured in its fixed design
it works behind the mirrors to keep its pace
with absolute precision and begins
to aim the searing brilliance of its one
glance, the very last that it will send.
Its name is clarity already spent:
a too-soon glow at sunset that pretends
to be the nothingness that follows death.
The Presence of Death
In memoriam J.L.
The way Death gives
a slight transparency to things,
faint hints of abandonment,
an uneasiness like drizzle.
The way it sneaks through the patios, the silences,
to focus on where it’s headed,
its well-known mission,
the unequivocal music of the Night.
The labyrinthine tapestry of fear
and pain arrives before it does.
And now that we’re aware it’s in the house,
we see things differently:
the suspicious stillness of everyday objects,
the beauty hidden in what doesn’t move.
In everyone who brings tears and words
to open the ravaged gardens of memory,
winter in disguise.
The way Death is a despondent music,
a distant aria that won’t surprise us
except for the fleeting landscape it calls up,
precise in every detail, still in flames.
Born in Seville in 1957, Juan Lamillar is the author of ten books of poetry, including Entretiempo (Renacimiento, 2015), a volume of selected poems. Prizes for his poetry include the Premio Luis Cernuda, the Premio Vicente Nuñez, and the Premio Villa de Rota.
Don Bogen is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Immediate Song (Milkweed, 2019), and the translator of Europa: Selected Poems of Julio Martínez Mesanza (Diálogos, 2016). His recent poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, the Yale Review, and other journals.