Para mis amigos de Somos en Escrito

Thank you to Ivan Argüelles for dedicating “​POEM IN THE SHAPE OF AN INVISIBLE VOLCANO” to Somos en escrito! This poem encapsulates our conversation at LitCrawl 2020. It's an honor to present poets of this caliber.

Two new poems by Ivan Argüelles

POEM IN THE SHAPE OF AN INVISIBLE VOLCANO 
             para mis amigos de Somos en Escrito 
lava flowers colored like evening’s red and gold 
cities crescent-shaped and buried in a trance of cinders 
elevated ruins of the only remaining statue of Persephone 
elegance of hands cut from their pulse and shadowless 
Moorish architecture of the eyebrows of Vanity 
symbolism and margin of all phonetic errors 
power of silent detonations deep within the heart 
and clamoring for meat of the soul those denied passion 
stars divided in half at the molten strike of noon  
rhapsodies of words that have more sound than meaning 
the shapeless intuition of light to transcend itself 
in a glorious burst of sunflowers and solar homophones 
the tryst of lunatic and aphasic in the sewers of Tenochtitlán 
rain in porphyry torrents pouring from a cloudless sky 
and mortals like blind birds circling their own destruction 
with the tiny feet of a lost poetic meter and bewailing 
the day when thunder and mountain joined forces 
men who believed the sea was only a hemisphere of sleep 
and waves always feminine and plural were at the root 
of the enigma caused by consciousness at birth 
etymologies of distance and repercussion like drum-rolls 
in the faint ear of the adolescent afternoon assassin 
was love ever more futile and gorgeous in its escape ? 
sentient ovals of the moon in its perpetual fade 
aspirin and silken ropes that tie the shadow down 
to a body that has only existed in pharaonic dreams 
the constant disrepair of language  
illiteracy of the gramophone and sewing machine 
the enormous and inexplicable circularities of heat 
coupled with the mysterious rumors of mummies 
grief ! legends of the half-formed antiquities of rock 
tragic association of the sorrowing trigger finger 
and the dizzying instamatic nature of fire-flies 
death over and over in small print at the bottom  
and pages of water and fluid discrepancies of thought 
rushing in all directions with nowhere to go 
skies decrepit with the gods of mistaken pronouns 
oracle and augury and spit-fire demons wayward desires 
the entire panoply of historic deviation  
one by one the children and the dead going south 
volumes of unused scripts the crying at the end 
the sadness of leaves bereft of their own speech 
the longing and drift of undetected planets 
asleep forever between eons of galactic despair 
 
10-25-20 

THE SYMPOSIUM 
                        “Oímos por espejos” 
                              Lorca 
this afternoon we discuss the state of poetry 
the archaic oriental ancient unfinished rock formation 
cliffs of rumor compacted into a few variable sounds 
the one you left behind in sleep is greater for  
its absence and the one you keep repeating as 
you stutter is the divine syllable not meant for human 
mirrors the ear and its occidental other stilled 
by a single blade of grass symbol of darkening 
and grief and as you pause for a moment sitting there 
discussing the state and condition of the already ruined 
art of the incomplete you have second thoughts 
it didn’t come from Ionia it wasn’t even in existence 
when they came over the Hindu Kush maybe it’s 
not polite to maintain this symposium and the others 
ragged hermaphrodites with bodies borrowed from 
some pre-Christian novel you oppose the direction 
their loosened vowels are taking projecting solemn auguries 
about the flight of skies about the inverted afternoons of Hades 
the Stygian helmsman and his broken oars the overloaded 
verses of tempest and bird-wing the adorned and adorable 
dead putti the fringes of sound the mind in its vocabulary 
of hesitation and phonetic spectra how is one to sleep  
with a head full of abracadabra and nonsensical whims 
about the origins of the Muses mountain born and 
dressed like kites or quicksilver inspirations to song 
and dance the nodding epithets and glories whatever 
the discussion is not straightforward drunken tousle-haired 
young men with skins of antelope or leopard how graceful 
their presences which just as soon disintegrate and the volume 
turned way up and cigarette chatter and gods of the sudden 
entrance appearing and disappearing clatter junk and 
long draughts of mescal and what can you do your fingers 
isolated from the rhymes and meters and a host 
of Latin pejoratives and dialect of rumor and repercussion 
the sea comes up to your knees and sunsets of Spanish gold 
and the vitriol of lovers who envy and nothing more 
what is there to explain and the anthologies spill open 
flower-fields and names like Eurydice or Beatrice 
abound and you look over your shoulder at Night 
secretive and whispering into a bottle that holds 
the Sybil green and upside-down vatic maniac tongue 
that none can understand the very bedlam and manicomio 
that poetry should be you try to assert but for 
the nymphs holding up drowned Hylas and the rivers 
rushing to lose identity and name and the Chaos 
of all human endeavor the critics and circus-masters 
naysayers and idolaters the fashion-worshippers 
and finally tiny and redundant in appearance the Rishis 
naked and dazed smeared with Vedic mantras uttering 
and stammering with their knees the ultimate truths 
the One and the Many and the Goddess the shimmer 
of distance and Echo her manifold faces and hair 
but for a moment visible before all the smoke and ashes 
and Memory disappear and left alone in an Empty Room 
you with the ghosts of Longing and Leaf 
Silencio !

 
10-28-20 

​​Ivan Argüelles is a Mexican-American innovative poet whose work moves from early Beat and surrealist-influenced forms to later epic-length poems. He received the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1989 as well as the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 2010.  In 2013, Argüelles received the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. For Argüelles the turning point came with his discovery of the poetry of Philip Lamantia. Argüelles writes, “Lamantia’s mad, Beat-tinged American idiom surrealism had a very strong impact on me. Both intellectual and uninhibited, this was the dose for me.” While Argüelles’s early writings were rooted in neo-Beat bohemianism, surrealism, and Chicano culture, in the nineties he developed longer, epic-length forms rooted in Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He eventually returned, after the first decade of the new millennium, to shorter, often elegiac works exemplary of Romantic Modernism. Ars Poetica is a sequence of exquisitely-honed short poems that range widely, though many mourn the death of the poet’s celebrated brother, José.

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