JOSHUA COREY [8903]

Joshua Corey   (Evanston, Illinois, Estados Unidos)

Se graduó en el Vassar College en 1993 y obtuvo una maestría en literatura Inglesa y un MFA en escritura creativa de la Universidad de Montana. Le concedieron una beca Stegner en escritura creativa de la Universidad de Stanford en 1999, y recibió su Ph.D. Inglés en la Universidad de Cornell en 2007. 

One of the Academy of American Poets' Notable Books for 2011.

Es profesor en Lake Forest College en Illinois. 

Ha publicado:

Selah (Barrow Street, 2003), Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005), Severance Songs (2011) and two chapbooks.

MERCADO DE DÉFICIT COGNITIVO

Ella ha olvidado lo que olvidó

esta mañana: sus llaves, la tostada en la tostadora que ennegrece

el interior de cráneos amados, pequeños planetarios

que proyectan constelaciones cada vez más

incompletas y extravagantes: el Culo

Grávido, la Rueda Mesozoica, la Gran

Barba de Chivo, el Ínfimo Fascista. Al otro lado de su ventana

se congrega un gentío que bulle en blanca confusión

como leche que hierve hasta secarse en la sartén—algunos

alzan dedos para apuntar en esta o aquella dirección

con certeza saltimbanqui pero

ellos están demasiado cerca para todas

esas manos voladoras, de manera que botan anteojos

y sombreros—disculpas inaudibles, alguien ofrece

un puño, la reyerta inunda el exiguo tráfico

de bicitaxis y camiones repartidores llenos hasta el copete

de lechugas que se pudren. Mientras, por encima de todo,

ella prepara las cosas del té: taza y plato de cerámica,

cucharita de peltre, tetera de hierro enguijarrado, un pedazo

de Sara Lee. Espera recordar

encender la radio, escuchar cuando venga el ascensor, cuando

se cierre el candado o alguien llame

a la puerta. Dentro de poco ella lo dejará todo

en la misma configuración

que hay en el fondo de un limpio fregadero blanco

con su grifo goteante.

Nosotros, que observamos esto, ya medio vueltos

hacia jardines soleados o hacia el semirremolque que se 

     aproxima—

sin ser el que está muerto pero tampoco exactamente vivo.

La piel es un guante que se arruga al tensarse.

Lo mismo el cerebelo. Una partida

de ajedrez entre juanpalos—me refiero a los insectos

esos que parecen de madera. Yo digo que aparentamos

a partir de fotos y repeticiones

lo que nos jugamos en estos nombres sin peso.

versión del poeta y traductor costarricense G.A. Chaves

Cognitive Deficit Market

She has forgotten what she forgot

this morning: her keys, toast in the toaster blackening

the insides of beloved skulls, little planetariums

projecting increasingly incomplete

and fanciful constellations: the Gravid

Ass, the Mesozoic Cartwheel, the Big

Goatee, the Littlest Fascist. Outside her window

a crowd gathers, seething in white confusion

like milk boiling dry in a saucepan—some

lift fingers to point this way and that

with herky-jerky certainty but

they’re standing too close for all

those flying hands so that eyeglasses and hats

fall—apologies inaudible, someone hands

a fist, the brawl overwhelms the meager traffic

of pedicabs and delivery trucks stacked high

with rotting lettuce. Meanwhile above it all

she’s setting out the tea things: ceramic cup and saucer,

little pewter spoon, pebbled iron pot, a slice

of Sara Lee. Waiting to remember

to turn the radio on, listen for the elevator, for

the lock to turn or a knock

on the door. In a little while she’ll put everything

away in the same configuration

at the bottom of a clean white sink

with its faucet dripping.

We who watch this, half-turned away already

toward sunny gardens or the oncoming semi—

being not the one dead but not exactly alive either.

The skin is a glove that wrinkles as it tightens.

The cerebellum’s the same. A game

of chess between walking sticks—I mean the insects

made up to resemble wood. I say we dissemble

from photos and repetition

our stakes in these weightless names.

A Fine Romance

I can explain: the sea is not ice. It is a salinity that resists

slippage, that cannot thaw or be resolved,

that will not stalk its own surface,

that can’t extratheistically transform its peculiar substance

without alluding to buggery, misconduct, pandered memory

(viz. Lot, Lot’s wife). But

I slip on some ice. I cantilever off

the frozen boardwalk; I careen into plasma’s low centigrade,

I am in the salt water 

one hand strikes through the glass, another hand, there can’t be three;

I am drowning, I invite the blood cousin

into the fibrous failed Egyptian brachia

of my lungs, I am swallowing the whale, its protesting flukes,

opening mouth, eyes, admitting the fat moon slack

of belly, fins, volcanic ash settling

around my ears, I’m submerged—how long can this

go on? You realize of course that these means yearn.

But you’re so sly behind

the buttons of your blouse. You are not open

or closed. The cat neither dead nor alive. And

the revealed thing we can’t call heart or beat or

even the loyal bone—damp clod stuck

to the back of a tamping shovel. We mustn’t. We’ll be caught. We’re

caught in a coil of rope—

constricted by red hemp—

twisting under zirconium—

lidded by an ocean—

Sæglópur

Gut of static hush the single voice venturesome and small

signal to noise the toe-tap adjustment

a Turner reality a Whistler’s frost of decadence

filming whipped grays and blacks indicative of sea

fog rushing the viewer’s 3D-glasses slack

planked lines for a ship a dislodged mast

for the ear to cling to sirens mob the horizon

somersaulting breathless in radioactive waves

exultant the listener at the proper remove

rent by slow chords adjusted for inflation

triangular perspective which my vector identifies

with the black swan’s soar atavistic capture

snapshot kingdom that friends me virtually

corrugated void so you feel every bump or

as they used to say ribbed

for her pleasure for your trapdoor undershorts

surprised by sin by fishy pomposity by spill

like a rainstorm overwhelming clogged gutters smearing

the window the power goes out alone in the shiphouse

after forty days the canned goods and dry cereal are gone

you try hooks from the windows baited with mucilage

roast what you catch in a fire built from carpet strips

gaunt hairy crazed passing the time by solitaire

the bodies in your basement have all floated away

so when the dove finally returns with the sun beached on Ararat

a whole neighborhood of suspicious shutters surrounds you

you know no one staggering to the post office

but there’s plenty of mail

as for friends and family they can’t even communicate

what it is to fall in love with your own private wormhole

to be lost in an abstract sea that might be world-historical

floundering or else mere drift of generational ressentiment

but it comes again plinking the solitary piano

spotlit on a stage introducing gradual compatriots

the human voice an instrument blunt or thrusting or edged

a knuckle of bells following the syllables of Hopelandic

out the auditorium tunnel to the huge double doors

that swing out over that sea

rising and falling with the crests of synthetic emotion

in touch with dry salvage tidal wave of time’s future

endless lyric moment posing as epic bearing down

death to sandcastles and mandalas and ephemera posing as life

children rocketing away through the curtain of water

that comes down at last like the fist of my imagination

and when the thunder’s passed and the a/c kicks back on

the commuter train blurs by and it’s time again for dinner

the vision of the ear again safely caged

three of its four feet shackled as they say in irons

and sorrow wrinkling the brow and savage jaws

of this lion my aging body hunched concealing its kill

I give you this little thing this devouring mouth of ribs

feasting on my own heart

nipples blind as pennies stunned by perpetual sun

beard of the shriveled groin unacommodated by old age

climb the lookout’s ladder to the peak of shipmates’ roll

ritual dunking and drunking crossing the fabled Line

each man alive to living knowledge

of resistless forces and the matter we commend our souls to

as if the mind were a body hurtled through the windshield

into a desert intersection with bullet-riddled stop signs

I don’t care I need it to be this emphatic

aria of the alone Werner’s opera in the jungle

Caruso floating magnificent on a barge of severed heads

the ruins are spectral interlaced with open sky

the serpent like a satellite telephone slithers into her palm

sin calling sin to beam us up and out of here

pinging the party’s moral location in geosynchronous orbit

subsiding like the forest itself into fields of farting cattle

like boots crushing gravel in the expanding situation

engulfing our increasingly limited faith in opposing troubles

a tired optimism keeps us limping trustfully along

while new eyes glimmer in the fronds all around

it’s a necessarily incoherent space I call a landscape

consenting bridging one last time the amplified storm

from lifted voice to lowering

and a sense of potable water amongst the tumbled rocks

if a scorpion is necessary a bleached coral reef’s waterfall

I fall gladly on sharp grass a paradise alone

the red face is rising pushing out from leafy territory

a brown face a pale face a face with no humanity

but a stunted sort of pity makes it possible to look

without seeing fresh capabilities in the crumbling of infrastructure

to carry us far down like a victim drowning his rescuer

fundamental to utterance are lips teeth and tongue

food for the ear with ears to hear

that’s survival’s reach and even it’s not enough

I am free in the face of each fully manifested disaster

and that feeling’s an addiction I mainline it nightly

we’re all hooked on phonics spinning appetite for destruction

for as long as we insist on a beyond to the face

that regards us now cruelly or with a show of compassion

it’s only a sea gone white as blindness

and the sea is not a desert

and the desert is no jungle

and what I must see when I behold the stars

is static of the city city

dictating to and for me

what gives our freedom to its law.