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Echo

By Pura López-Colomé b. 1952 Pura Lopez-Colome

Translated By Forrest Gander Read the translator's notes

It would not sound so deep
Were it a Firmamental Product—
Airs no Oceans keep—
—Emily Dickinson

Afloat between your lens

and your gaze,

the last consideration to go

across my gray matter

and its salubrious

deliquescence

whether or not I’ll swim,

whether I’ll be able to breathe,

whether I’ll live like before.

I’m caught in the bubble

of your breath.

It locks me in.

Drives me mad.

Confined to speak alone,

I talk and listen,

ask questions and answer myself.

I hum, I think I sing,

I breathe in, breathe in and don’t explode.

I’m no one.

Behind the wall

of hydrogen and oxygen,

very clear, almost illuminated,

you allow me to think

that the Root of the Wind is Water

and the atmosphere

smells of salt and microbes and intimacy.

And in that instant comes

the low echo

of a beyond beyond,

a language archaic and soaked

in syllables and accents suited

for re-de-trans-forming,

giving light,

giving birth to

melanin

hidden within another skin:

the hollow echo of the voice

which speaks alone.

Source: Poetry (April 2009).

Biography

Pura López-Colomé was born in Mexico City in 1952, spent part of her childhood in Mérida, Yucatan, and attended high school in the US. She studied literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, publishing literary criticism, poems, and translations in a regular column for the newspaper Unomásuno. English translations of her work include No Shelter: Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Aurora (Shearsman Books, . . .

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