Words by Fernando Rendón for an Opening
Por: Fernando Rendón
Photo by Fredy Amariles
In an instant the mirage was petrified. The man stricken by the last ray of the afternoon weighed in his coffin as much as four men together. He weighed on us like the land on a species subdued by itself, cleft by its darkness.
The law of gravity that crushes us under the noontime is the obverse of the proscribed legend that no one thought could be recovered. But other stones floated under this same sky to the voice of a Milesian hermit.
We shall talk with a provisional voice of water when an ancient sea becomes beach in its ebb tide, then a volatile element dries up on the sand, becomes flesh and the liquid dream of a fibrous, mutating life.
This universe of perpetual clay that dies and is reborn, loses its substance in liquid or goes into its furnace because it does not know or cannot always resist the pounding of impregnable time. Since it is not so easy to suffer a hundred years when evil endures. Words are made of air and of a mass of black earth and fire, they are grains of sand magnetized by the wind or lumps of an inexpressible clay, that does not yet break into the furnace of death. Words are also heavy like rocks thrown together or like dust becoming compact on the memorious earth.
But we must also talk with a voice of stone that some day will again be light. The future is written on the ancient stone. For being reborn is to return from the stone to our beaming nature.
With an impassible purpose we organize under a radiant project of the ulterior world. We possess the keys of a new life in construction. Anything may happen but it is forbidden to fear.
It is not what is yours, what is ours is a constant. Remember the bisons. Only sick buffaloes stray from the herd. You are blinking, eye. You are talking too much, mouth.
Only poetry can be felt. Therefore be wary of dogma. Be wary of slang in bars. We shall talk only when it is necessary. It is necessary to renew oneself, but not seen by everyone. Do not get ahead of others, much or even a little. Be wary of the weakening of the dream. Do not speak when you are alone. The more you know and the less you know about all of this sweet matter, the better. In an irrational scene we observe one another. We love and understand this absurd pleasantness in which we converse without fully understanding one another. In which the Medusa can petrify us for a word we said, or for a word we did not say.
A poem is not a game of chance where the gambling heart lays a senseless wager. Nor does the poem gamble its existence on a greyhound race. Poetry is the cipher of the spirit, the vestige of a superhuman metamorphosis.
The fire destined to unchain us is the struggling imagination, in the glittering heart of the stone, in the sibylline plant and in the books banned by the Inquisition under penalty of confinement, in the songs and myths that nourished the infancy of the peoples that scale the substance of the Earth, rooted in an incandescent cognition.
The poem solves the riddle. Which is the swift river, the pleasant and always changing truth that disowns us along an inexpressible mutation, whose course can only be altered by dreams?
In poetry, in the crucial writing of the poem, we all gamble without ambages this mortal history, in this axiomatic time.
Medellín, July 2009.
