Surrealism Alfresco

by Jorgenrique Adoum (Ecuador)
translated by Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

The chance encounter of a sewing machine
and an umbrella on an operating table
or clocks with eyes.
So you thought
the incredible had to be thoughtup.
But then you hadn’t been
in my country, in my countries, never knew
what happens in its landscape of colors
in cholera, for example a spurred
boot and a priest hat
on top of a cadaver, an Indian
to be precise, as if his history lice,
hailmary beads
weren’t enough? Oh mad symmetry of uniforms
in the humble dictatorship of the dead,
and the American everyday is so well known
we die it by heart too,
and hunger is so identical to old age
when it starts to undress us on the inside,
and there are important teeth biting
our earth, and the Virgin in a cap and leggings.
That’s like that, it’s like that, it’s like that more than what, more
America in the oblivion bodegas, more
echo bouncing back to the screamdoor,
searching out the guilt for us like a snake.
What did you know then if not these vignettes,
if not this atrocious crime carddeck,
not how you’d come up with nothing like the
dead man who died without saying a word, crying
the maggots he had left ever since
they’d given him a break from his killing.
But this is no painting or word
welldone: it happens, nothing more, after
mass, after Independence and other
longlasting tunes. But the blood,
not the cries, now has the word,
and better to laugh at the last of so much.