Gravity

My grandmother’s body was sturdy and solid. When, as a small child, I drove my head into her belly, arms aloft to clasp at her waist, I felt no broken lines, no fissures, no gaps. There was comfort in her density and warmth in the weight that anchored her to the tiled floor of her minute apartment. A short woman, a few inches under five feet, she was dwarfed by the incongruously stately height of the ceilings hovering above her, but her silhouette in the darkness of an unlit corridor filled the threshold of her kitchen. She stood there guarding her lentil stew, lamb chops or soupy rice with clams in her checked white and grey shirt, and tweed skirt, t-towel dangling from her waistband, scrubbed faced and blunt bob barely visible in the shadows. She called me “niña” and she whispered family stories as food bubbled under the lid of her pot. She was a figure at the threshold for me: she connected the unknown past with the present, she made me travel back in time, she gave me the gift of memory.

Her hands told another story: slender, elegant and long-fingered, they were her one concession to art and air. I admired them as she fanned herself in sweltering summer nights and imagined them flying over the keys of the piano she played as a young woman before the death of her father took away the modest family fortune that may have secured music stayed in her life. With those same hands she wrote letters to the women she had left behind in her personal diaspora: cousins steeped in the religious fervour of a whitewashed village in the South; friends bathed in the rainy melancholy of Galicia veiled in rain. Her handwriting was fluent and patrician and betrayed no effort. My own was spidery and belaboured: it took me a long time to be promoted to using a pen instead of a pencil, as the stringent requirements of my pre-schooling required a neatness that was beyond the reach of my compromised dexterity. I imagined the loops of her hand on the paper as the variegated paths of friendship. Watching her I learnt to keep friends close to your chest at all times, to cherish friendship above all else.

In my early twenties I came to Ireland and never went back to Madrid permanently. I became one of her correspondents: her letters followed me around my perambulations in Dublin as I was forced once more to uproot and move to yet another ramshackle house in the inner city. At first they had the airy elegance of the writing hand I knew so well when she wrote to her friends in my presence when I was a child. As the years went by, however, the rest of her body started to match their evanescence and I could feel her spirit thin out on the lines on the paper: a “t” breaking and separating from an “a”; the shattered loop of an “o”; a steady incline on the line; the much fainter touch of the nib of the pen on her signature. Her body began to break like the signs on the page until she stopped writing and my own body became the one that anchored us both when we embraced.

Soul food

I have been away from the stove to tend to some pressing personal and professional matters for the last few weeks but thankfully the inter webs keeps its furnace going to bring freshly baked talent to our plates: check this out to get a serving of poetry in English and Spanish courtesy of the always courageous and inventive Marco Balbona.

Mark my words, this young chef is going places!

 

Was it for this that all that blood was shed…?

Romantic Ireland is dead and gone/It’s with O’Leary in the grave

Ah, well. Happy Paddy’s Day everyone!

 

An emotional encyclopaedia of food: disappointment

This was the freshest batch of bread, then you took a slice and saw a green dot and you thought of its minute finger burrowing through to its heel.

This was a red and juicy strawberry, scarlet red and shiny, but it turned to mush in your mouth and left the sour taste of gone off wine.

This cheese held such promise: once firm now crumbling like the ancient marble of a Roman ruin. How can it taste of nothing?

But we keep going back, endlessly hungry, we keep going back.

 

Single shots: prawns

One afternoon you think that you are grilling prawns, the whiff of brine and salty smoke invades the kitchen and your nose. Then you look down and you take in the choreographed massacre on the pan. Bodies transfixed by fire pile up glistening like the corpses of soldiers at the battle of Thermopylae. You have become one of the cruel all seeing gods of Ancient Greece. For a moment you toy with the idea of turning the dead into a glittering constellation in a distant galaxy.

Never mind beauty and pain: with a faint turn of your wrist you toss them one more time over the fire. Now you are ready to devour them.

The time of the ant. The time of the wolf

Sometimes I feel like a blank canvas, sparsely blotted by experience. There are days when I take the steps through my section of the maze of this gigantic formicary and I barely register my surroundings. Days where life is perched on the bare bones of subsistence, as we know it in post-capitalist societies. The senses are dulled, vacuum packed, the knife with which I slice time has a blunt edge. They are days where temperature is tame; colour is cream, brown fading into beige; all music turns into static; eating is only registered because my plate is suddenly empty and my hand suspended in the act of driving nothing to my mouth.

The world is a poorly sketched backdrop and if I get close to you and you and you, I will see you have no features on your hastily drawn faces.

They are days without smell.

Not tonight. Tonight the air was grater-sharp as I rode my bike uphill to an unknown part of town. Rows of houses reeled before me: the peaks of their neo Tudor roofs promised Poe-like disturbances behind their walls. It was dark and damp with the slate sheen of a close Irish night. I turned round to look at the oncoming cars and they rode by spectrally: headless drivers behind the wheel. I knew nobody and nobody knew me. The world was menacing but new for all that. I felt hunger and cold, I barely knew where I was going. I had to pay attention. On a bike in this dark damp god-forsaken night in an unknown part of town, I was a fragile body.

This is how lambs feel in the company of wolves, a trembling catastrophe.

There is a moment, on a night like this in an unknown part of town, when you turn round to go home and the path is new and the familiar to which you move is fire and shelter.

Tonight I turned towards home and in that moment, wheeling my bicycle in the darkness, I smelled grease and potatoes wafting out of a chip shop.

And then I remembered.

An emotional encyclopaedia of food: seduction

3. You are sitting a few feet away from the stove: the steady waft of a simmering stew caresses your nostrils. Red wine, tomato, beef, and herbs conspire to pull you out of your reverie with their heady aroma: a bitter saltiness that will bring flesh and soil to the tip of your tongue. Before that you heard the sizzle of the onions on the pan, imagined their silky skin browning under the coat of olive gold. And this moment of imagined pleasure is more intense than the savouring of it: a finger lingering over the key that will sound the last note of a symphony; a bird of prey about to clutch the skin of its victim; a perfectly ripe orange dangling from its branch for one last second.

Photograph by Eliseo de Brétema

That old chestnut

You want to be somebody else. You are cycling through the city, it is dark but not late and gentle dregs of humanity cross your path as you head towards the canal on your bike. You don’t want to be somebody else because you are unhappy with who you are: who you are is evanescent; who you are has flown into ether in good company and fine spirits. You are so confident in who you are that you could shed it like a tunic made of silk: you could drop your whoyouaredness as easily, knowing that it would still be there in a few hours for you to pick it up and lightly put it back on.

You want to be somebody else. Specifically you want to be a couple in their late fifties walking down Leeson Street with their arms wrapped around each other’s waist. You want to be him as much as you want to be her, as much as you want to be both simultaneously. You want their ease and warmth, of course. You very much want to find out where it comes from: whether it has been earned through a steady life together, or whether it has dropped from the sky like an unforeseen catastrophe. You want to know whether they are holding each other to prop each other up or not to sink deeper. You even want to wear their indistinct high street clothing all greys and blacks and earthy browns; all really not caring for or expecting any fresh eyes to fall on their bodies.

And then, with the subtle autumn chill that tiptoes the edges of the canal, as you leave them behind, you realise that what you want is a shadow of what you had once: as a child holding your mother’s hand; as a teenager lost in the pages of a novel; as a newly wed believing in some endless wedding waltz. It is autumn and what you want to become tastes like a chestnut: earthy and hard to get to. And it has the flavour of a chestnut–the flavour of a welcome winter.

Single shots: dressed crab

I have the unlikely key to turning the kitchen into a beauty parlour: a tin of dressed crab. Tightly packed and the size of a make up compact, it promises side way glances and a blush as deep and red as the crab’s carapace. The crab daintily moves away from the vanity table and on to the wardrobe to get dressed, his flesh as white and delicate as the lace on a petticoat. Open the tin though and it delivers a sobering paradox: the crab is not dressed; he is a naked, battered and broken exile.

Our daily bread

The Hop House: Korean food; a pint of Guinness; a close friend, smart, loving and up for a challenge. Inspired by a fine anthology of Portuguese poems, we talk about translation, about poetry before and after the Carnation Revolution. And then of Spanish poetry before Franco’s death and of the great Basque-Spanish poet, Gabriel Celaya. Before we know it camaraderie and bravado push us to walk the tight-rope of bringing poetry alive in another language. And  blow-by-blow we try to revive the boxer so that he can bounce back onto the ring. This is the result:

Poetry is a weapon loaded with the future

When you no longer expect to be privately moved

But your heart beats on beyond consciousness.

Ferociously alive, blindly exalted

As if your pulse was beating against darkness.

 

When, about to fall, you look straight into the clear eyes of death.

You tell the truth: the wild, terrible, loving cruelties of truth.

You say these poems that open up the lungs of those who, suffocating,

Demand to be born, to be rhythm, to be the law of everything beyond themselves.

 

With the speed of instinct,

With the lightning of a miracle,

With palpable magic, in our hands

Reality turns into its twin.

 

Poetry for the poor, poetry that is as necessary

As our daily bread,

As the air we breathe thirteen times per minute

To be and, in our being, be a glorifying yes.

 

Because we live blow by blow, because they hardly

Let us utter our names,

Our songs cannot be pure ornament without sin.

We are getting to the heart of everything.

 

I curse poetry conceived as a cultural luxury

By the lukewarm

Who wash their hands, sit on the fence, do not commit.

I curse the poetry of those who do not take sides until they are stained.

 

I make mine all faults; I feel all suffering within me,

And I breathe in all songs.

I sing, and I sing and,

Singing beyond my private sorrows, I grow.

 

I would like to give you life, to provoke your actions,

And I measure carefully what I can do.

I feel I am an engineer of verse

And a workman who with others works the iron core of Spain.

 

Such is my poetry: instrumental poetry,

At one with the blind beating heart of oneness.

Such is my poetry: a weapon loaded with a growing future

That I am pointing at your chest.

 

It is not poetry conceived drop by drop:

It is not a beautiful product. It is not a perfect fruit.

It is like the air we all breathe,

Like the song that expands everything we carry inside.

 

Words that we all repeat

That we feel as ours until they fly: they are more than what we say.

They are what we need: nameless.

Screams in the sky and deeds on earth.

 

Gabriel Celaya