Arras for the taciturn wedding of Empty Life and the Inexplicable Object. The abyssal definition that Jacques Lacan raises about the meaning of poetry, suits him perfectly – never better said – to this intense and radiant volume by Rafael-José Díaz (Tenerife, 1971), with poems that, in many cases, they make up a single sentence significantly slid vertically (“from top to bottom pressing the page”, it is asserted), and in which “now” and “nothing” are their most recurrent terms. For there is no other time in them than this instant, just “a knot that ties the breath to the encounter.” Or “like a dream lost in the falling waist of the afternoon or whiskey.” No longer than “the hour sunk to the bottom / of the spiral of absence.”
Nor is there a preconceived space, but only the Newtonian vectors that, as they move, trace our bodies, as in a billiard table without a wall. A space, for that very reason, always unbalanced; due to excess fusion (entering the forest to “get away from what comes to meet me sometimes / without my wanting it”), or due to excess fission (“distancing oneself from the body / is the price paid for get ahead ”) before the world. Even, or above all, in the presence of the body of love – “because of how much desire resembles absence”, he explains – it appears, precisely, with a present body, because, in the intervals, “The hands suffer far away / of the skin / and the skin saddens / if it is not caressed ”.
Also a narrator (he has just published the book of stories In an enigmatic way), essayist and translator, Díaz shows, in this his tenth collection of poems, the maturity of his peculiar ability to face the most diverse oppositions and crossroads. Song and story intertwine here in the same proportion, just as assertion and silence, anecdote and metapoetic reflection, Orphic gaze and colloquiality, stain and pure knowledge … snow ”and“ goat droppings ”- go black on white! -) speaks to us from the extreme solitude of its precinct, and that is also that of the reader. In debt to Leibnitz’s model of man, for whom we are monads without a window to the outside, the extreme loneliness becomes entirely explicit towards the end of the book, in a poem like “Solo traveler in a subway car”, vain aspiring to free himself from “This feverish ventriloquism” that is to be alive, and that makes us “characters of ourselves”, eager for “a crumb of otherness to put in our mouths”.
Between the void and the nothing more or less colorful, we are, then, before an abyssal journey, where all the portable abysses of our author are shown. Abisal is, from the outset, the polysemy of the beautiful title, Under the eyelids of someone who is moving away, whose preposition, in the most obvious sense, admits to be taken as a verb, in such a way that the poetic voice is also announcing to us that it lowers the eyelids to those who move away, or perhaps, lower their own to whoever does it (“So many disarray of people!” Claudio Rodríguez was hurt). Although it would be fair if it were both a preposition and a verb, when corroborating that the one who walks away is the poet’s own alter-ego, saying goodbye, with contained mourning and a certain caustic rage, of their past ages: of the child and the young man who was , and then he places his offering under the eyelids and lowers them, as it should be done with all the deceased.
Especially significant is, in this regard, Pantheon, the central and most extensive section of the five that make up the book, where relatives and friends who are already deceased wander, to whom Díaz pays emotional tributes, and which will finally be comparable to the deaths themselves in life (all “now already an illusory personal heritage”, without anything being returned “to the original target of the unused”) and to the already gone lovers of the past: those “mouths that kissed in the water / and left in the sea the saliva of death ”, and whose bodies now appear fused and dismembered: all the sensations and their anatomies,
“… the skins, the backs, the penises, the nipples … confused in a single corpse of extinct pleasures / that silently floats in memory.”
Not even the poetic impulse, which appears as the only threat of illusory redemption, remains unscathed in that detritus of the past ages. Under the sky, which marks “the insurmountable border between what is saved and what is lost”, stands, at the most, “a lifeless poem, torn from the void, / with nothing to say, like the crickets that sing all night” , when it is already known that “after all, the destiny of the letters / is to be part of the darkness”. And the poem is, then, the invoice of the last resort:
“It is one of the few things that seems sensible to dedicate himself / if the poet does not drink, if he is not old enough / to make love every night / nor can he afford / more dangerous vices: singing, yes, without eagerness / but without pause, to fill the night / at night, the darkness of darkness, the emptiness of emptiness, sing with the assurance / that the poem breathes with the rhythm of the body / and that the body empties into the poem ”.
It was logical that a collection of poems that opens with a section entitled “Carnivorous waves” (and what an engulfing metaphor, by the way, of the insular space!) Ends in “Muñones”, as the section that closes the book says. It begins in that, from the outset, the devastation, the desolate withdrawal (“those whims that were once gifts”, “a simple walk without charm”, etc.), for a journey that would be very good for Edgar’s headband Morin, when he warns us that life is a process of demolition. And the most helpful temptation would then be mysticism, the vertical, static and ecstatic journey, emulating the snow, trying to fill the “Nostalgia for a world without words”; but that one too ends up melting and, surrendering to mysticism, would mean the abolition of memory. It would be succumbing to one’s own extinction, and there seems to be no truce, then, to “The hateful feeling of being one with oneself”, as expressed in “The Rapture”, chapter of a single poem, where irony and humor acquire salvific dyes. The narrator now tells us that he has explained to his podiatrist that “he no longer needed his feet / to walk with his feet on the ground”, and that, just as he is not worth “feeling the rapture of indifferentiation” Nor does it serve him to go through life as a “man with leaden feet / transformed into a quantum kangaroo” … Thus, faced with this unsolvable dilemma, he / we only have to learn to deal with the stumps, from the final chapter, carrying with ” the signs of a devastation / small caliber, manageable ”, and maintaining the unstable waterline between consciousness and the world. Well, even more severe than in the famous transience of Heraclitus’ fluvial metaphor, it happens that “rivers take the glances / of those who contemplate them standing on the shore.”
