Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Three Poems RICARDO PAU-LLOSA panta rhei¿Quién es tu hermano? Tu vecino más cercano. (Who is your brother? Your nearest neighbor.) —Spanish saying In emergencies, the closest will do. Love, even a few blocks away, fails when the stranger next door rises in charity unknown to him till then. The day is saved by those whose names you’ll forget: the driver in the next car, the gardener who rushed into a house he’s never seen to pull, guard, rescue. All the verbs which were alien and will resume their callous grip, now storm the sudden heart that just then fled the wolf condition. But it hears the lunar groan returningly. Homo homini lupus est, teach Romans who knew so much about impenetrability. Ovid and Hobbes differ, Erasmus equivocates, Freud surrenders. A pack of thinkers have torn at the flesh of our layered psyche, wishing to find an identifying center. We are the poker hand, tossing and assembling bluff and triumph. We fold, we hold on. There is nothing Chaos, our secret god, cannot bestow. arion 28.2 fall 2020 70 three poems Proteus In the dream, the man is bathing a large dog whose breed changes as the chore unfolds, starting with a rottweiler, then bulldog, great dane.... Starts on the lawn, then shifts to the groomer’s, the man’s bathtub, a creek from his childhood.... First it was a dog he owns, then a former pet, then a friend’s, a dog from a commercial.... It is as if the dream announced this thing, then that, then changed its mind, and it is then that the man understands he cannot truly embrace the idea that the dream has a mind to make up or change, for then life would have a toolbox, a menu, program tabs, training schedule.... hence throwing into the acid of questions whether he has such powers—to alter, navigate, reflect, cure, develop.... this tumble of paradigms, themselves becoming a chain, sequence, sentence, syntax, metonymy.... because the thing —the announcement— cannot simply be a fate but a motion, a variance, an effect that churns the weather of effects, topples the still life on the table just when the painter had caught the just-so light, right before the supper, the sole ingestion point of the thing, the call to itself, begins and leaves everything else twirling. Ricardo Pau-Llosa 71 puddle 2 Samuel 14:14 My student sees filth everywhere, even in this dank, rotten-leafed, cigarette-butt poisoned tongue of late morning bronze. It laces the oak branches above it and folds the mid-day sky in green convections. Allow me to introduce you to squallor’s gorgeous mirror who taught the golden youth to catch himself in love. This silent bed whose many sheets are one mellifluous of shade, has hosted boot and quandary, astronomy and betrayal. I cannot hold it accountable for accuracy or permanence. Surely it knew from the start how short the mission and how stark the light. But linger, pupil, where an eye might brave the trough whose vapid depth dared frame the trees, their sky....