From Dylan and the Whales
María Baranda
Translated by Forrest Gander
16.
Never have I touched the sea or its insubstantial skin
which embroiders the sacred.
Never have I touched the dreamy sand of the beach
where birds keep guard over their own thinness.
Not once have I listened to the stealthy
crowd of waves,
nor to the painful wallop coming from behind the mountain.
But I’ve dreamed, ah, Dylan Thomas, I’ve dreamed
of the salt of apparitions
and time’s fruitful fall into my hands.
I’ve swallowed ocean water all alone screaming
through my eyes and my split ends and my wrinkled body
and my vanquished hair that ignites
the foam in my throat.
Because I’ve been the antihero
who travels through silence kept by that sea, the word.
The one specifying the scent of algae
on the table of sacrifices.
Here too we nourish the idiom of the clown and the afflicted.
Here the picklock for the skin of Virgilians,
the nettle’s piercing silence.
Here the wind’s detritus and the countenance of some tracks
circling back into a fable.
Here wild green is the color of prophets
who devise frayed Aeneids
charged with the rage of those who adored travelers.
Here is everything in its distinctness…
We’ve lost so many phoenixes that the eagle’s cry
becomes a daily prayer and the blackbird
with its cackling dark voice
kneels in the night
on the blanket of the damned.
You’ve come this far, Dylan Thomas, just to see the dream
that dreams you howling into tomorrow:
it’s a dream of a tiger in the summer of your blood.
A tiger with candle eyes and a water face.
A rain-in-your-throat tiger that loathes the valleys
of the imagination, the agonizing badlands
of burning memory.
A tiger of lime and obsidian, its stripes in the shadow
of a tomb. The tomb that awaits you,
the hard white tomb with its white certainty and its worms
in the briefness of that vertigo now gnawing at your fables.
Your horror fables so like the tears of archangels
that irrigate rivers and forests, their borders invaded
by red puddles of hollow words.
Words that sting men, that singe loneliness
in the saltpeter, that spike the insubstantial saliva
of those who don’t even know
the language of the rose and the orchid.
Stainless steel words
in which the peasant’s thirst flickers out
and the children’s hunger goes mute beneath their tears.
Contributors
Many talented individuals are featured in the West Marin Review. Please click below for this volume’s contributors.
- FRONT COVER
- Lia Cook Binary Traces Young Girl
- BACK COVER
- Carol Whitman High Tide at White House Pool
- PROSE
- Muriel Murch Farming the Flats
- James Misner Three Short Stories
- Rick Lyttle Harry Truman and Me
- L. L. Babb Chuck Lange Kicks Ass
- Linda Gebroe A Play in Four Pitches
- Barbara Heenan Grabbed by the Pussy
- Lina Jane Prairie Kelp Work
- Morgan McDonald Mobile
- Elizabeth Wing The Plankton Expedition
- G. David Miller Mad Dogs and Americans
- POETRY
- Reeva Harrison In Pursuit of Thingness
- J. C. Stock Mountain Bliss
- Nancy Cavers Dougherty Inversion
- Amy Elizabeth Robinson Reading Michael Meade’s Why the World Doesn’t End…
- Jorge Bravo The Universe
- María Baranda From Dylan and the Whales Translated by Forrest Gander
- Mary Winegarden Long Marriage
- Derveaux Baker Second Chances
- Jon Langdon When It Counts
- Regina O’Melveny The Bird
- Claire Millikin Christian Girl
- Rebecca Foust all this beauty
- Jim Nawrocki On Reading The Encyclopedia of Creation Myths
- Wayne Hill The book about walking
- Luis Lenz-Fontan Life
- Barbara Swift Brauer Fog / Trees Returning
- Sarah Anna Paden Hoshigaki
- Stephen Ajay Windless and By Our Own Hands
- Kathleen Evans Crossing the Line
- Brian C. Felder Cold Calculus
- David Swain Border Crossing
- Elizabeth Wing Pierce Point
- ART + ARTIFACT
- Lia Cook Binary Traces Young Girl
- Emely Garcia-DeLeon Point Reyes Seashore
- Wendy Goldberg Inside Out and Early Spring Clearing
- Charles Robinson Granddaughter Isabel Robinson
- Thomas Wood Tomales Bay at Chicken Ranch Beach
- Torrey Baron Shadows
- Julia Lucey The Bear and the Bees
- Jennifer Thompson Can’t Face It
- Abbey Wenk My Happy Place
- Pam Fabry Blue
- Patricia Thomas Negative Dark Matter
- Bear Lombard Our School Fox
- Stella Bailey White Horse
- Dana Hooper Jigsaw
- Anne Hudes Dolphin Light
- Mimi Robinson Kyrgyzstan Yurts
- Barbara Lawrence Point Reyes Lunch
- Danae Mattes Horizon and Harbor
- Betsy Kellas Invocation and Barriers and Boundaries 3
- Vi Strain Moments of Natural Beauty
- Amanda J. Sanow Red Hill
- Jo Margolis Grid with Calligraphic Frame
- Kate Kozubik Red Tree with Bird
- Glenn Carter Knot
- Marianne Reger Bouquet
- Marsha Balian A Day at the Races
- Gene Crowe Purse, SF MOMA
- Jane Zich Running Deer
- Alex Farnum Kelp Work
- Anne Faught Pages from a Life
- Jon Ching Indestructible
- Eleykaa Tully Hope
- Laurence Brauer Fog, Trees, Mt. Wittenberg Trail
- Jean Warren Coming Together
- Caitlin McCaffrey The Claw Family
- Amanda Tomlin Bees
- Harriet Kossman Mabel, Cleo, and Peter: Morning Meeting on Pamela’s Deck
- Sherrie Lovler Inspiration
- Barbara Treichler Gregor California Pipevine Swallowtail
- Mark Ropers A New Day
- Carol Whitman High Tide at White House Pool