Truck

5 Poems by Nicomedes Suárez Araúz

           Nicomedes reading at Jose Rodeiro’s salon as Jose absorbs the energy of his words

                                                            (Photo by Alan Britt)

                                         Kristine and Nicomedes in Cadaques, 1991

                                      Kristine and Nicomedes acostados in the den

5 Poems to Kristine

Longing

I spring forth from your center,

orchid, Eros´ flower,

blue opening to the dawn

and its green shadows.

Watching the river

I have neither arms nor hands.

I cannot caress your womb,

your back, your body, full

of waters and distant places.

In the turbid waters

I do not sense the danger,

For my inner voice wraps around

your perfect slender form.

I arrive to your body, left breathless,

and I know I cannot miss.

I know that together

we will die on the beach,

longing for our children.

The Memory of Your Body

How that wave crests from your blue eyes

with their grey splinters of salt

and scattered seagulls.

Slowly, folding and folding again,

bell of water ringing lighter

than translucent mica from the moon.

Here a folding: your body arches;

another there and your hair of dawn

folds over the curve of your shoulders.

I dive into the center of the warm salt of your eyes

and swim toward your edges.

In your luminous smile I see the precise source

that surged from time to shape your body

a source lighter than my memory of your body.

Fragments of a Summer Dream

You recline in the valleys of your body

and the sea pulses in your heart.

A drop of water

a blue voice

your eyes.

What cities were those?

I don´t remember itineraries.

Whenever I forgot

the moon

I woke up in your night.

On your face

the shadows of dusk

were always falling on your smile.

Our Pulse

Sea.

It is full of skin.

On the beach, my love

eats green strands

of her thoughts.

Sea.

It is full of rooms

waiting only for the fall

of our legs.

Sea.

Without vertebrae

runs and wanders through the corridors.

Beneath waves of sheets

two pulses are one.

Red Earth and Rain

The quiet murmur of time after midnight.

We pass through the night

and reach the still sleeping villages of dawn.

Even the wider world

has surrendered its forms so as to sleep.

Your breath quickens

Our love almost impossible to bear.

In love our hearts are

like red earth and  rain

mingled, never to part.

Nicomedes Suárez Araúz is a poet, short story writer, essayist, aesthetic theorist, translator, visual artist, and professor of comparative literature.  In 1977 he received Bolivia’s National Prize Franz Tamayo. He is internationally known for Amnesis, his aesthetic theory of artistic creation based on amnesia as a structural metaphor. Pedro Shimose notes that Suárez ‘founded the Kingdom of Loén, a literary space that the poet rediscovers through the imaginary reading of Gonzalo Mendoza de Arroyos, an apocryphal chronicler from the 16^th century. This author rescues “The Scribes of Loén” from oblivion, dedicated –in the absence of their leader—to ingenious calligraphic divertissements.’ (Shimose, 2011). After five decades away from his country, he presently lives on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, with his wife Kristine, his affective as well as intellectual companion for almost his entire life. They have two children, Nicomedes and Andrés, and two grandchildren, Bjørn and Theodore.