Angel Gonzalez (1925-2008)

Before I Could Call Myself Ángel González

Before I could call myself Ángel González,

before the earth could support the weight of my body,

a long time

and a great space were necessary:

men from all the seas and all the lands,

fertile wombs of women, and bodies

and more bodies, incessantly fusing

into another new body.

Solstices and equinoxes illuminated

with their changing lights, and variegated skies,

the millenary trip of my flesh

as it climbed over centuries and bones.

Of its slow and painful journey,

of its escape to the end, surviving

shipwrecks, anchoring itself

to the last sigh of the dead,

I am only the result, the fruit,

what's left, rotting, among the remains;

what you see here,

is just that:

tenacious trash resisting

its ruin, fighting against wind,

walking streets that go

nowhere. The success

of all failures. The insane

force of dismay...

         ─Translated from the Spanish by Steven Ford Brown and Gutierrez Revuelta

(from Palabra sobre palabra, 1964)