Hugo Garcia Manriquez
Pastoral of Things
                                 for Zaidee Stavely

Or one,
One writes in the cold

believes he’s moving away from abstraction, only
to enter through the back door

The fear of representation, of going back
to representation, that is,

to animosity

•
The unit suspended
in some sense of duration
reduced to a zone unknown

All the natural phenomena
heavens included

The mysterious “quality” of action

•
A mobilization of arguments

A supposed return
to the void prior to the project,
da capo, for there is no inside
that remains attentive to the position of its object

Only outside of nature,
not inside, can there be time

Fire is
the company one keeps

•
The city, the poem and in both
the nature of human occupation

•
What awaits is love
as language waits
the terms of its own
insertion in the world

If asked
they’d say words
grew bitter. Related words grow
bitter too,
necessarily

Better write the “poem” in letters
with “personal communications”

•
Alone or
in groups the mind
in a landscape

In the corner of the painting
in that right angle
the moon
closes the circle
the moon eats her quarters

When needed
crows will remove
the marginalia

Someone
glances into the photograph
something dark is
added