The next reader is Tedi López Mills.
Good evening.
I've made a change of plans.
Instead of reading two poems in English,
I'm going to read one of the long poems I have chosen
in English and then I'll read it to you in Spanish
since I translated quite a few of Sobin's poems.
"Eleven Quatrains and a Note from Ventadour."
for Brad.
"Neither this world's nor another's,
that broken house with its books and wind,
bells sewn on the breathing veils between.
With their wire, moon-flat baskets
came searching for the rain's meat.
Those readers of ditches, dark margins.
As if listening in that barge of blue chalk and choked
linen, to her own waves as they rose.
Over the fixed smoke of the almonds, the other,
the gypsies', their rabbits roasting in the windless light.
Untouched, grown monstrous with my own shadows, oh,
hooded lilies, the sun shimmying upon the skin of the ditch.
Way the eyes slide an instant slower than the face,
the hair lugged like a trophy over the shoulders after.
You only could take your gaze from my keeping.
Tease it, cold, nebulous, through the taut shadows
of your teeth.
The heart forever offered, entrusted to its own
preditions, that weird inadmissible rose,
valentin froissé.
Glances backwards through the vaulted loop of her arms.
Rasp, as the blue rhinestone hair clips slip under.
In these white shadows, the windlight we live in
would perish without the word-pleated waves,
that cadence we give them.
As the petals catch against the blond canebreaks,
say, say nothing, it's enough.
If a wrist went blind on its own whispers,
always towards the end, the grammarians,
albas, our dawn songs, on what terraces,
onto the carved waters of what viol
shall our hearts be pitched?"
And now in Spanish.