Gallery of the Dead
An iridescent cloth under a glass in the museum;
it’s a skirt, a cape, a crown of some sort.
By 700 AD the Parakas of Ancient Perú
had become perfect weavers of bird feathers.
To this day, on the fabric’s surface, the hairs
of the hairs of the woven feathers split the light.
But in exhibition is only a cloth framed by text
and glass, forced into stillness.
Sophisticated is the word used in the object label.
It adds that this practice, the weaving, was an attempt,
not an achievement, but an attempt to represent
the beauty of the surroundings.
Words fall short. Not like in a poem where they fail.
To fall short here is to enlighten, to name.
This was going to be a long poem about deceit, about museums
and living cultures with their familiar objects cased in glass.
Then I saw a radiant cloth drawing breath in front of me;
the feigned admiration of the curatorial note had no life.
This robe was there with a whole flock woven into it. Scattered in flight,
gleaming from all angles, then that flock regrouped as a solar disk.
I saw the weavers with their plumed weft threading
unconceivable colors for death. I saw
a blustery coast, a desert underneath the weight of fog,
the funeral procession of a gleaming body under a feathered robe.
No tongue, no human palate, nothing we know of can call out
the perpetual motion or the temperature of these colors.
Go now and put that on a label, describe it, place it in time or in culture.
My mouth is nothing but a wet cave unable to sing about refraction.
On Learning
Currently, he lives
on the previous step
to everything else.
Not the first line
of events but a draft
of what is to come.
Like a pauper,
his hand
is held out to her.
Yes, he begs.
It's not that he
is in a search of any kind,
it's more like saying
lo que sea su cariño,
translate it to whatever
you want to give me is fine;
it's not exact, it lacks context
or pity, but that'll do.
Only that such a phrase
is of no importance,
since it's barely audible,
at this stage everything is.
The hand is cupped.
The arm streched out
in the slowest
of motions. It travels
under the sheets
reaching askew
and late or never
her shore.
She hands out
Instructions. Those
are clearly heard.
It's her gift to the world,
a manual or a map
for any road
that may or may not
lead to her.
He could trace
her with a brittle
piece of charcoal.
He'd like to, maybe
in a long line, hardly
any pressure. Charcoal stick
intact, almost.
That's his touch: purposed
sketch for a full contour
of hips and the eyes, yes
the eyes in empty gaze,
acquiring weight
in the spent charcoal.
But on this step
that precedes all else
he doesn't know
how to touch, how
to initiate anything
that could lead
up to sex or down
into some sort of grabbing
as she welcomes
no soft approach.
Don't land on me lightly,
only flies do that!
Assertive, she needs
him to be, assertive and wild
in the same breath.
Like a boar must be
wrangled or speared
into a cave and not
captured in black
pigments on the cave wall.
Learn to pull
hair, learn the hunter
gatherer way, demand,
don't beg, renounce
all soft paleo
attempts to draw
to extract a soul.
There's no such a thing
or there is no use for it,
which is the same.
Slim clouds pulled taut
over the horizon. Birds
crossing the sky diagonally.
The intersection
of those lines is a text
that he can read.
But there is no substance
in it for her. Unshared ideas
have no body, he agrees.
Actions and words
should come from a body
and end in one.
A spear held in its exact center
can tremble and even sing
in oscillation.
That's a piercing thought,
it'll end eventually
in the flesh.
A wound that gapes
and festers, the limit
of what can be shared.
Beyond it lies what,
abstraction? febrile agony?
the visions of wraiths?
He suspects it's anticlimactic.
Earnestly, he shouldn't
use as many words.
But he needs to employ
a whole string of ideas that may
remember a body in its past tense.
Her disappointment, he learns,
is not a thought but upfront
experience in the flesh.
He is a good student. Not now
though. He sits on a step
previous to everything else.
The remnant of fire, the pungent
stench of blood, the filth of the cave,
there's no step beyond that.
Rodrigo Rojas Bollo (b. 1971) is a Chilean poet and translator. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where he studied with Philip Levine, Derek Walcott, Sharon Olds, and Elizabeth Alexander. He is the author of five poetry collections and two books of essays, including one on Mapuche-language poets. His translations have been featured in Barbaric, Vast & Wild (Black Widow Press, 2015) and The Serpent and the Fire (2024), Jerome Rothenberg’s final anthology. From 2003 to 2009, he was a contributing editor at Rattapallax Magazine, publishing South American poetry in translation. This year, two new works are forthcoming: Viaje al jardín de la noche (Pez Espiral, 2025), and The Child Langston Hughes Imagined, a long poem on Gabriela Mistral’s translation into English, to appear in Brick, the international literary journal based in Toronto. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at Diego Portales University in Santiago.