Roberto Echeto

trans. by Jennifer Shyue

Lush Vortex

Naked.
Lost in the light
that lashes and expands,
stubborn like the night
in those places
where the sky is green
and fractures.
There’s no air
between the horses,
no distance,
no dust;
just fierce antennae,
sparse stalks,
fertile
in ewes that bleat
fires
then weep out
the smoke.

And thus,
the line is born vertical
and rises,
opens its legs
and fills the bright sky
with its forms.
There it is, broken,
the city broken,
the tree still,
the buildings suffocated
by the body of silence,
that animal whose tentacles,
mute and untouched,
enclose
our world,
the only one
we had
and knew.

And now we ask
with the nicked thread
that is voice and horizon:
who can see
the clarity hidden
behind the debris?
The answer: no one
or everyone, doesn’t matter.
They’re all deaf,
drowning
between their asteroid
teeth,
fracturing the air
with their steel-wounded
mouths;
they see static
bridges and arms,
chests
moving away
from the meadow choked
with poison.

  And the silence there,
pressed against the walls,
occupying the air
with fertile brutality,
sly unease covering
the mushrooms’ beauty,
transmuting it into stable
noise, into naked nothing,
skillful cipher of death
in life.
And the dark, like water,
floods the streets,
occupies the halls;
flattens time
and transmutes it
into a black dagger
that sketches
a single dark
wound.

Inverted arch,
grimace line under
nose,
sloping column,
light in the eyes
that glides satisfied
over the broken valley.
They swell.
They swell, those distant
pupils,
and fill with nothing,
with scouting birds
whose fire-voices
reveal the void
(lord of the city)
and to the tragedy offer
a silty mask,
veil that dims
all 
we lost.

Fog and rust,
sparse silence,
agile ruin
scattering
invisible
like hunger,
who brought you?
Long death,
vain silence,
why do you laugh?
Skillful dark,
enemy of desire,
who laughs with you?
Horror,
the present
long like death,
who invoked you?
Why are you here?
When do you leave?

Together,
clasped to the smoke,
lost in the multitudes
that run and hide
beyond the abrasive
birds,
we look at the horizon
and lose our eyes
in the dark.
We are the ants
attempting to prevent
the destruction
of our home.
No.
We have not succeeded.
We are unruly
in the chess
of forms.
We are savages disguised
as queens and knights,
tenuous lovers of that wise
dew.
And yet there’s something pure
in the stubbornness
of our actions.
Must be the desire
to walk on this rock
we consider our own.
This is why—
because helplessness is a tongue
of black fire—
there’s nothing to see
except the air.
Let’s go.
Let’s drown the exhaustion.
Knot our voices.
Vibrate on top of the dust.
Let’s continue together
despite the wounds.
Shout with me and with us all.
Let us be grief and flame.
Let us walk ahead of the echo
toward the tree.
Take us
and smile.

Jennifer Shyue is a translator focusing on contemporary Cuban and Asian-Peruvian writers. She has an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and a BA in comparative literature from Princeton University, and was the recipient of a 2019 Fulbright grant to Peru. Her translations have appeared in The Margins, Words Without Borders, and 91st Meridian. She can be found on the web at shyue.co.

Roberto Echeto was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1970; holds a degree in literature from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello; has produced radio programs and worked with magazines and newspapers; has published three collections of stories (Cuentos líquidos, Breviario galante, and La máquina clásica), one novel (No habrá final), and two book-length essays (70 años de humor en Venezuela and Maniobras elementales, which won Fundación para la Cultura Urbana’s Transgenre Contest in 2015). In 2018 he was a participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He enjoys westerns, action movies, clear afternoons, and quiet gardens. He lives and works in Bogotá.