6266.- MARIANNE BORUCH

Marianne Boruch (1950), obtuvo la maestría en Bellas Artes en la Universidad de Massachussets en 1979.

Poeta que a su decir escribe sobre “los momentos ordinarios de la vida cotidiana”, ha sido profesora de inglés y dirigido el programa de maestría en escritura creativa de la Escuela de Artes Liberales en la Universidad de Purdue, Indiana, desde 1987.

Su trabajo literario incluye cinco colecciones de poesía, entre las que se encuentran: A Stick that Breaks and Breaks yMoss Burning (Oberlin College Press 1997, 1995); Descendant y View from the Gazebo (Wesleyan, 1989, 1985), y el libro de ensayos Poetry's Old Air.

Poemas y ensayos suyos han sido publicados en The New Yorker, The Nation, Iowa Review y The Georgia Review; su poesía forma parte de diversas antologías: The Best American Poetry, 1997; Boomer Girls, Poets of the New Century; Poets Reading: The field Symposia, entre otras.

Los reconocimientos que ha recibido incluyen dos premios Pushcart; el premio Terrence DePres y dos becas de la National Endowment for the Arts. También fue becaria de la Guggenheim Foundation.

Sus libros más recientes son Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin College Press, 2004) y su segunda colección de ensayos sobre poesía In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations (Trinity University Press, 2005).

El cuerpo


tiene sus pequeñas manías.
Después de la cena es cuando
el pulmón prefiere respirar,
oxigenarse en la profundidad
del aire, renunciar a lo demás.
(Antes de cenar, sí;
también durante la cena;
pero algo en las primeras horas de la noche
demora el aliento del día y advertimos:
qué bien, todavía llega; todavía se retira...)
Así los huesos
y la tribu entera
---fémur, espina--
al ejercitar se fortalecen.
Querría el cuerpo
un pequeño kilómetro o dos. Gracias.
Transitarlo en bicicleta
o en carrera. Dentro del agua. Azul.
Y comer. Hábito de larga
circunvalación donde un huerto
se ofrenda, espuma la cerveza, pródigas
las vacas despiertan al granjero,
cede el campo su trigo, y el trigo comprende
Seré trillado e irradiará harina
en la habitación entera, el panadero
sudoroso, abrirá la ventana
agradecido del valioso
confetti. Y el cerebro,
encerrado en su extraña
doble ciudadanía, haraganea allí en el cuerpo
limpiamente ajardinado como un paisaje.
O, abandonado en ruinas;
qué intelecto, con rosas silvestres creciendo
próximas al océano. El cuerpo
condesciende. Ay, perfuman el aire,
a veces. Se enredan. En verdad,
secretamente, al amanecer,
lo primero que el ojo
anhela mirar.












_____________________________________




On rain washed paper dried,


On rain washed paper dried, ink
still blurs. But all words
are stains. The paper’s rippled
lunar, mountain and crater,


and seas on the moon, misnomer
of plains that looked like
water once, no-end-to-it shadows,
fractal to fractal. The telescope’s eye


fooled the eye. From there, does
earth rise and set? Or a thrush,
would it sing its trouble backward?—
the most private tremor first, then


the public part, famously
melodic but fierce, really it’s
fierce: stay the fuck away. I know
that lie, Sea of Tranquility.












Human Atlas


Because the body really
is Mars, is Earth or Venus or the saddest downsized
Pluto, can be booked, bound, mapped then.
Or rendered like something off the bone, fat just under
the animal skin, to lard,
cheaper, quicker than butter, like stillness
belies restlessness, like every yes
was or will be not, never, no,
none of that.
A full section in such a book
keeps the skeleton quiet. (So untroubled to be specific, to say
femur, rib, half-minute of splendor,
to stare like that
stops time...) Or slick pages and pages given over
to slow the blood, remake muscle, to un-secret
that most mysterious lymph, its arsenal
of glands under the arm, at groin, at neck, awful
ghost lightning in it. Inscrutable.
Complete: because
the whole body ends, remember?
But each ending
goes on and on. Complete: because some
minor genius with a pencil, with ink, with drastic color
makes that arm you've known for years
raw, inside out, near wanton run of red vessel and nerve,
once a sin to look, weirdly now,
what should be hidden. Oh, it's garish
equals austere.
Compute. Does not compute. Tell me.
Then tell me who that
me is, or the
you understood, the any of us, our precious
everything we ever, layer upon
bright layer.












Still Life


Someone arranged them in 1620.
Someone found the rare lemon and paid
a lot and neighbored it next
to the plain pear, the plain
apple of the lost garden, the glass
of wine, set down mid-sip—
don’t drink it, someone said,it’s for
the painting. And the rabbit skull—
whose idea was that? There had been
a pistol but someone was told, no,
put that away, into the box with a key
though the key had been
misplaced now for a year. The artist
wanted light too, for the shadows.
So the table had to be moved. Somewhere
I dreamt the diary entry
on this, reading the impossible
Dutch quite well, thank you, and I can
translate it here, someone writing
it is spring, after all, and Herr Muller
wants a window of it in the painting, almost
a line of poetry, I thought even then,
in the dream, impressed
with that "spring after all," that
"window of it" especially, how sweet
and to the point it came over
into English with no effort at all
as I slept through the night. It was heavy,
that table. Two workers were called
from the east meadow to lift
and grunt and carry it
across the room, just those
few yards. Of course one of them
exaggerated the pain in his shoulder.
Not the older, the younger man.
No good reason
to cry out like that. But this
was art. And he did, something
sharp and in the air that
one time. All of them turning then,
however slightly. And there he was,
eyes closed, not much
more than a boy, before
the talk of beauty
started up again.