III

BAR ES PINZELL

 

To Pep Lladó and Borja Darder

 

“I must lie down where all the ladders start,

in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

W.B. YEATS

 

Everything is much darker in a prose poem, just like paying homage to Hölderlin or this last glass of cognac toasted to Andreu Vidal on the window of dust: dark light, bright darkness of pain. Can´t you hear the song? “Love is bread with cheese,

bread with cheese is life,

life is digesting,

love is god in a boat,

life is a shipwreck

in a glass of white wine,

love is falling into a pool

and finding love.” The bone and cloth shops are also much sadder in a prose poem, just like Àngel Terron reciting stones by heart, making painful recommendations, remembering the graves of dead friends as if they were onions full of blood. And so this architectonic vault has witnessed all the milk and recitals, all the verses and beers, the mineral bread with oil, goodness and badness. It is time to sow salt, to say farewell to this final supper, to accept the shadows and sing at my last party of Dionysian spirits.

Unpublished

Translated by Núria Cohen.

(Caimari, 1984). Jaume C. Pons Alorda is a writer, poet and translator. Among his books of poems are Tots el sepulchres (2015), a trilogy comprising Els estris de la llum (2009), Cilici (2009) and Carn vol dir desaparicions (2010). His narrative work includes Faula (2012) and he is the author of the diary of the film Història de la meva mort by Albert Serra. Especially noteworthy are his translations from English into Catalan, particularly Leaves of grass by Walt Whitman, for which he won the Serra d´Or Critics Prize and the Cavall Verd Award for his translation of poems.