Gloria Gervitz (March 29, 1943 – April 19, 2022) was a Mexican poet and translator of Ukrainian Jewish descent.
IN THE MIGRATIONS OF RED CARNATIONS
Gloria Gervitz
from Migrations
in the migrations of red carnations where songs burst from long-beaked birds
and apples rot before the disaster
where women fondle their breasts and touch their sex
in the sweat of rice powder and teatime
vines of passionflowers course through that which stays the same
cities crisscrossed by thought
Ash Wednesday
the old nanny watches us from a shaft of light
pools of shadow breathe
purples rain down nearly red
the heat opens its jaws
the moon sinks into the street and the voice of a black woman
a sad black woman sings and swells
incense of gladioli
and your fingers slip inside me like warm mollusks
we’re in the brittleness of autumn’s hide
in the rectangular park
in the dog days of summer
when the lightest colors are most deeply moving
after Shaharit
raw appeals now forgotten
winds rise lightly rinsed by prayer
forest of pepper trees
and my grandmother always played the same sonata
a girl eats a snow cone in Chapultepec
the ivy vine tangles in the mist
the light splinters
and the clothes hang in the sun
my grandmother’s sonata is impenetrable
you said it was summertime oh music
and the invasion of dawns
and the invasion of greens
down below shouts of children at play
vendors of nuts
breath of yellow roses
and as we left the movies my grandmother told me
dream that the dream of life is beautiful my child
beneath the summer-drenched willow only restlessness lingers
docile clouds descend into silence
the day dissolves in the hot air
green erupts within green
I spread my legs beneath the bathtub faucet
gushing water falls
the water enters me
the words of the Zohar spread open
the same questions as always
and I sink deeper and deeper
in the vertigo of Kol Nidre
before the start of the great fast
in the blue haze of the synagogues
after and before Rosh Hashanah
in the whiteness of the rain
my grandmother prays the rosary
and in the background plummeting
the echo of the shofar opens the year
into the gulf of absences to the northeast
pour words saliva
insomnias
and farther to the east
I masturbate thinking of you
the screech of seagulls the break of day
the froth in the dazzle of the wing
the color and the season of bougainvilleas are for you
the pollen still on my fingers
your scent of violets sour and feverish from the dust
words that are nothing but a drawn-out prayer
a form of madness after the madness
the cages where the perfumes are shut away
the endless delights
the voluptuousness of being born again and again
static ecstasy
move
more even more
don’t be afraid
and the photographs fading in the fermentation of silence
the unscreened porches
fever growing red in other skies
the gleaming verandas darkening with the acacias
and in the kitchen the newly washed dishes
fruit and syrups
in the swell of rivers
in the night of willows
in the washbasins of dreams
in that steam of female viscera
rising unmistakable and expansive
I leave you my death entire complete
my whole death for you
to whom does one speak before dying?
where are you?
where in me can I invent you?
and the milagros piling up in the church of Santa Clara
and the atrium filling with tears
ink flowers in spent Hebrew
dripping from the Torah scrolls
skidding slowly
the days slipping away
squeezed by my migraine
I can’t find myself
I don’t even have candles for my wake
I don’t even know the words of the Kaddish
I’ve lost my bearings
where does the beating break?
how can I cast off this last shred of sleep?
and the house lashed to a tree lashed to the wind
the leaves and their opal shadow
spiral of echoes
reverberation
we are what we think
the thought behind the thought
the cranes return
spread silence with their wings
sudden white flowers in an empty sky
in the cities at noon
farther and farther south
when heat surrounds the mountains’ breath
always to the south
I prefer to cling to my inventions
and not to know what really exists
better to dream that I’m dead
and not to die of all the dreams that invent me
I go back to sleep and dream no more
and the light stumbling on the brink of day
and the cry of the trees a deafening roar
and the afternoon just repeats itself
doesn’t disclose that lull in reality
the only inhabitable place
fleeting geometry
slow shuttered insomnia
dawn draining away
a sun of bees breaking apart
and as my grandmother prays her rosary it rains
and as they say Kaddish for me it rains
and I’m more distant by the day and don’t know what to do
I can’t escape myself
and only know and feel others inside me
an invention that starts up every morning
the tedious learning to wake up and become myself again
and if I woke up once and for all?
the morning melts away
intervals of warm silence
sharpened spaces
sudden structures
rectangles
I can see fragments almost smells
each level has its own blood flow
my nanny accompanies me as I pack my things to go
doves all around the room flapping of wings
I open the window
minute fissures ache atrophy
inflame the afternoon
I can’t feel what I am
I am what I was
and what I wish to be
in the soaring of orchids centers open to penetration
on the perimeter
girlfriends lightly caressing themselves
because it’s always the first time
because we’ve been born again and again
and always return
and the flowers opening
and the high birds oh so high pausing in flight
shredding themselves on the clouds
and the rained-out clouds filling with wings
in the span of the dream
I wake and it’s almost nighttime
I walk into a movie theater
it’s snowing in New York
I walk into another
the present is just a circumstance
I descend
it’s almost eight in the morning
and it’s January
we elapse within ourselves
I’m living overlapping moments flattened on a plane
I spread over afternoons that exist for me alone
outside the windows are today’s hours
I don’t know this day
I cling to my other days
cling to myself
hang on to myself
and even so even so everything comes to an end
even those things for all time come to an end
even old habits come to an end in the end
small saturated moments swell
merge in their dissolution
though I remain shut away in this room
though it keeps on raining
though I still can feel that I can feel
though it still makes me keep on feeling
and fear makes me break out of fear
and I make myself break out of myself
but why believe all this when across the ocean
geraniums bloom all year long
and large trunks laden with warm resinous odors
overflow in unfamiliar bedrooms
and ointments and soaps made of oats and goat milk
face powder made of wheat toothpaste that tastes of chewing gum
and those rinses for untangling hair on drawn-out days
Venetian blinds scorched by the green sun of Cuernavaca
a girl gazes at her sex in the heat of midday
thick with insects and lizards
I’m not sure whether to sleep is to be awake
my hands get in my way I don’t know where to put them
the slow rain almost stops
everything stops grips me but the rain falls
windows open
below them dunes
and farther still ships set sail like an exhalation
bound for the girls in the frescoes at the palace of Knossos
girls of water and lime
and the skin sloughs off
and underneath a dusty sun
and farther in birds
and we never get farther than ourselves
but all year long geraniums bloom in distant memory
and the green blinds are there in that memory as well
beats etching themselves on a daguerreotype
where are they beating?
where are they?
something slides heads toward cessation
I’m far from the mornings
far from men and women
far from habits and customs
I let myself fall
the sky clouds over
the irretrievable yellow
the soft fall
colors lost
shattering
tenacity of white
and the first words of the Torah are inscribed
in the atonement of white
in the anguish of white
in the neutrality of white
I’m hanging on to life
gusts of sun
gusting rain
nearly blue ramifications
hair a mess and that smell
that smell rising from childhood
a lingering streak of yellow
flutters reappears
now sways gently
from a distance it almost looks like a sketch of a sunflower
now it uncouples barely discernible against the white
once more it pierces the substance of nothingness
once more the dreams start clinging to that almost still-yellow streak
I’m not going anywhere everything is here here is there
I identify intensely with the dust
sharp shifting empty vast landscape
I can’t ford the air
I start to live off the breeze
I wish I could pray and don’t know how
I don’t even know what I want to say
everything is inundated
there are no edges
there is quietude
there is all I don’t understand
and I did not invent that girl
she thrust her existence inside me
darkest roses sprouting in memory
the women braiding their hair scenting their armpits
the smell of sex ripening
and in the Jewish quarters high and low hidden in the mornings of Segovia
the love affairs of Jewish girls and Christian noblemen
still stalk the bridges
and the tales of the Haggadah proliferating
as I wait bleary-eyed in airport lobbies
in landscapes of neurons nearly on the threshold of the oracle of Delphi
there is one and only one answer
no explanation is forthcoming
barely the incision
and my mother and some friends play bridge
and chain-smoke cigarettes
and the women’s perfume mingled with the white
grows dark
through the windows the nearly forgotten pepper trees
pale wind
whiff of wicker on the faded porch
the house dissolves
eternity of the gardens of sand
doggedness of the wind
the leaves curl begin their return
I wake up and the girlfriends tremble in the willows
the shady veranda cool in the bustle of linen
I brush your brown hair
we barely move
pollen coats that distant memory of mirrors
it still burns I touch myself I’m alone
dawns from the other floods
beloved distant one
complicity of the voice
its persistence
and I am what is falling
now I’m in a landscape full of mockingbirds
I get closer and closer
when I claim that vastness
I’ll barely have the strength to wake in the brevity of death
the light strikes the air
we’re in the place where the colors open
the days are long and clench like migraines
and everything repeats
the trees casting off
the night dissolving
and then?
nothing is true but the reflection of the dream I’m trying to shatter
and which I don’t even dare to dream
constant plagiarism of myself
and time is the only meeting place
it’s all nothing but time
there where a few sprigs of bougainvillea in a glass of water
suffice to make us a garden
because we die alone
and death is just the awakening
from this first dream of living
and my grandmother said as we left the movies
dream that the dream of life is beautiful my child
the candles’ glow grows rusty
and I where am I?
I’m who I always was
the surprise of being
I come to where everything starts the beginning of the beginning
this is the time
the time for waking up
my grandmother lights the Shabbos candles from her death and looks at me
Shabbat lengthens into never into after into before
my grandmother who died of dreams
endlessly rocks the dream that invents her
which I invent
a wild girl looks at me from inside
I am whole