Ivan Argüelles and Arturo Mantecon
Mon. Feb. 25 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Open Mic/Free
Ivan Argüelles is an innovative Mexican-American poet and the author of numerous poetry books this century and the last. Long considered among the foremost of the American surrealists, over the years his poetry has also reached into other spheres, notably epic poetry. Principle among his works are: “That” Goddess; Madonna Septet; Comedy , Divine , The; FIAT LUX; Orphic Cantos; and, Fragments from a Gone World. His all Spanish collection, Lagarto de Mi Corazón, was published in 2018. His collection Looking for Mary Lou received the 1989 William Carlos Williams Award. In 2013 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He is the identical twin of New Age Prophet José Argüelles.
EVENING THE FADE OF ALL
the spine still hot from fever
yet already walking barefoot
in grasses wet with dew distilled
by the sun now an opaque orb
declining in the western hills
a myth of life and breath and
the great and fortuitous guesses
about light and the origins of time
and given the small space for the
soul to escape and the multiple
days of water left in the pool
with its obsidian reflections and
even the Aztecs who have taken
quarter on the south-side of legend
where the maize fields reach deep
into the prospect of another world
shadow figures of the many-gone
moving in shifts of pearl and
agate and the voices too high
above in a sky separated from
its own surface and the talking
going on beneath beds of leaf
and coral isn’t it a wonder
you declaim in an archaic rhetoric
strictly speaking to blackboards
and the chalks of pure imagination
erecting libraries of untold verse
anemones of ocean and spittle
yards where unconfirmed children
spill over the little abysses shouts
that bring twilight to its knees
and the overt speculation about
madness and the splendors of weed
justice of the spoon and the horse
noontimes in the bedlam of memory
lunching with angels long dead
the massive cliffs overnight and
trumpets of vowel and diphthong
splitting the verger into unequal
hemispheres of bucolic and reverie
you keep making noises and rust
and its train of thought circling
mirrors of heat and the abacus
that lacks hands to count and
all the higher mathematics grown
red in the corner of the mind
that begins to see backwards into
the zero formulated by dying
just at the hour when moon and
steam conspire to shape the inks
of whatever it is that can be read
even as layers of silence mount
and wall and spool threaten
the remains of dust beautiful
spirals climbing pedestals of flame
into the depths of the galactic sea
the mind its portents of lasting
a longing to aspire to a dream
of the only thing that ever meant
to be the hand become inert
in its immense digital map
syntax and index of the finger
pointing to the maze of azure
air and its vanishing suburbs
fleeing forever into the past
you continue to declaim and
nothing ever comes back of that
passage through the underworld
asphodel blooms gone blind in
the inextinguishable lamp
rose and counter-rose paling
in the forever of an afterthought
has not been and what else
evening the fade of all
THE REMAINS
the discarded comb
the useless shaving brush
and what the mirror no longer holds
distance of immeasurable hours
nowhere now in the spent landscape
of discarded talismans the photo X
the door which is only a reversal
of the outside of things vertigo
and drumroll and silence wherever
feet used to attempt an escape
or arms in sleeveless ambition to rise
lifting from the ponies of gravity
a body surfeit of bone and thought
small shadows of memory
lingering in unlit passageways
listening for the call-bell
the minute issue of aphasia
in the dissembled space of night
the known and the unknown balled
up in a fist of courage to move
only to stop on the vowel
capable of igniting the last flame
a section of air the rebuttal of breath
winnowing clouds with a single finger
the shoelace and the device
which lacks a name and now lies
like a subsidiary to rust somewhere
by the window looking west
the area of empty garages and
wheels turning slowly without
direction and everything else
that used to function for reasons
that never could be explained
Arturo Mantecón is a poet, story writer and translator born in Laredo, Texas and raised in Detroit, Michigan. His poetry has appeared in La Ventana Abierta, Poetry Now and various anthologies. His short stories have been published in The Americas Review, Café Bellas Artes, Bliss, and The Dunes Review. A collection of his short stories, Memories, Cuentos Verídicos, y Otras Outright Lies, was published by En Casa in 2014.
He has translated the poetry and prose of the mad Spanish poeta maldito, Leopoldo María Panero, in three collections: My Naked Brain (Swan Scythe Press, 2011), Like an eye in the hand of a beggar (Editions Michel Eyquem, 2013), and Rosa Enferma / The Sick Rose (Swan Scythe Press, 2016).
He has also translated the prose and poetry of the uniquely erudite Spanish writer, champion poker player and ornithologist, Francisco Ferrer Lerín in a volume titled Chance Encounters and Waking Dreams (Editions Michel Eyquem, 2016).
He has also translated the poems of major infrarealist poet and friend of Roberto Bolaño, Mario Santiago Papasquiaro in Poetry Comes Out of My Mouth (Dialogos/Lavender Ink 2018) with original artwork by Maceo Montoya.
