Not Here.

• Author: Espada, Martin
• Position: Poem

Not Here for Raul Zurita Santiago, Chile, July 2004 The other poets tell me he tried to blind himself, taped his eyelids and splashed his face with ammonia. What Zurita saw gnawed like a parasite at the muscles in his eyes: Chile's warships invaded the harbor of Valparaiso and subversives staggered at gunpoint through the city of hills down to the dock. Only the water knows how many faded away like black boots tossed into a black sea, or dangled from the masts, beaten by knuckles and rain into scarecrows the seagulls would pluck. September 11, 1973: Zurita's heart crashed deep in the ribs of a Navy ship. The officer in charge of interrogation shook the poet's papers and fumed: This is not poetry. The other poets tell me: Electricity was involved. Seven years later, Zurita blinked to save his eyes, and wrote: ... in the name of love let even the steel-toed boots that kicked us be loved, and those who mocking us said "Do a little dance for us" and put out their cigarettes on our arms so we would dance for them, for our love's sake, for that alone, let them now dance. Today we walk through the courtyard of the presidential palace. The fountain speaks in the water's tongue; the fountain of smoke is gone. The bombers that boomed across this sky left no fingerprints in the clouds when they dropped their rockets, twisting the rails of the balcony like licorice. Today Allende is white marble outside the palace, mute as a martyr, without a hand free to wave from the balcony, without a voice to crackle his last words in the radio air. Zurita says...