Divagating about Bahía, a damper draped in cloudiness and disappearance, Manning's dialogue with Fierro marched off over the bridge to San Vicente wedged between a centaur and a moto. No one will ever see it again. Or will they?

Quizzing through the three halls of an afternoon, I found Dorothea's olive carpet inside her trailer on Drake Road where in 1979 I learned to peel the paper from the chocolate of my popsicles, a poem on legal paper about the life of a little mouse that Barbara typed up illustrious before my birth and folded into rhyme without any eyes ever seeing it, and a 2011 message from Fierro about a poem handmade on Parra's paper with a dedication that follows him unforgettably. Dorothea left when she was seventy-seven and Barbara was fifty-eight. Fierro tells me Nicanor Parra is ninety-six, and still drives.

And now where? Where ire stagnates trembling, like remembering Ida alone remembering Bergamín; like Manning alone remembering Ida and Fierro, remembering me.

De vagabundo por la Cruz del Sur, entre el Centauro y la Mosca, Fierro se decide a reiniciar el diálogo con Manning. Nadie nunca sabrá por qué: ¿o sí?


Quizá por el inesperado triple hallazgo de esta tarde. En una carpeta olvidada entre sus papeles de la calle Ellauri ha encontrado un dibujo de Marco Maggi del año 1971, un poema de María Elena Walsh manuscrito e ilustrado por ella de 1969 ("Sapo Fierro") y un poema manuscrito de Nicanor Parra con esta dedicatoria: "Nicanor Parra a Ida Vitale y Enrique Fierro recuerdos inolvidables Montevideo setiembre mil novecientos ochenta y cinco". Un Marco de trece años, una María Elena de treinta y nueve y un Nicanor que acababa de cumplir sus setenta.


¿A dónde iré que no tiemble?, como recuerda Ida que solía recordar Bergamín.

Cornered plainly in the dew-covered department in luggage claim, Sean, the invented generator of this blog, has been libeled. Why for a fictitious lack of need has he been de-tutored? Algal plants, rootless, produce no flowers, but dichasiums blossom fiercely, dichotomically, branches multiplying symmetrically in twos. Fierro, effing and blinding, quotes his own lines, finding in January 26 a space exceeding a date and its limits, budding racemes expanding higher than rubble. Always hasty, he's well appreciated within Manning's heart and that of our many adventurous companions.

And it goes without saying, our efforts ignored do better to ignore the ignorers, log-rollers the lot of them would tumble first, they would lose if we gave them time to. Why forgive them their poverty of accent, when our voice on bright days is always gold (Au), sensing ascension, rising with tides?

Coincido plenamente con Rocio y con Desvalijados: Sean, el generoso inventor de este blog, se ha liberado y no necesita de tutor alguno. Sobre todo si dicho "tutor" es alguien como ef, que no es mas que "limites y escombros". Hasta siempre, pues! AGRADEZCO de corazon a Manning y a los que me acompanaron en la aventura. Prefiero no decir nada de los que se dieron a la infame tarea de ignorar nuestros esfuerzos: ellos lograron lo que querian, yo perdi. Y perdon por la ausencia de tildes!

The days in Miami, impossible, too intensely incondensable. Largely spent on SW 10th Street, downtown, at Romain and Shani's apartment, felid-free, unlike that of Nicholas, Pastèque and Guéridon, inescapable compatriots of Romain who accompany me always, even when arriving hours late for dinner. Romain's eggplant appetizers luckily best served cold, and chicken. Romain whose close calls with combative geese in Tours' Jardin des Prébendes d'Oé, near my old number 10 on the street of the same name, left him the talent to imitate the anatid war face exactly. And Shani, now his fiancée, whose French outshines her Spanish as well as the March 19th moon, but whose persistence with the magic magnetism of poetry, helped by Romain's carnal Spanish syntax, will surely soon give off a glow at magnitudes capable of competing with the skyscrapers' nighttime neon that filters through their seventh-floor shutters.

Largely spent on SW 95th Street, inland, before the backyard terrace where a pack of crazed cats, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer amongst them, all moon-driven or readers of Romain's poems, were in pursuit of their Juliet. Their Juliet who improvised her scene atop a fence calling out with her ambulance meow. While indoors destiny self-manifested inside tiny clay cups of cared-for coffee served by Lorenzo's imagined hand; inside the crackling between the photograph pages –grey hourglasses in red campfires– turned by the kind hand of beloved Marta; inside the creative complicity and a wave to share enthusiasm proffered by the open hand of Margarita. The same Lorenzo and the same Margarita of Ping-Pong Zuihitzu renown –the revelation, hospitably inspiring Foes Amis– who just 8 days past lowered the curtain on their project and on these very moments, leaving us alone thinking encore!

Saint Jerome speaks, the horror and the silences terrified their souls, then he descends into the catacombs where a boy, largely on W 6th Street, still puts his hands on the pages of Richard Scarry, convinced that to push is to hold, that his small hands steady that large book, those hands less powerful than he realizes and more powerful than they are. Those hands who don't know that mom keeps the story in front of him, and that when she lets go the book falls away. In that book, in those days, there were no rhinoceroses. And in these days there is not that book, and not those hands, only unions between old and new friendships without which we wouldn't think to live and to remember being who we are.

Los días de México imposibles, por intensos, de resumir. La mayor parte de la estadía en San Jerónimo, en casa de Carmen y Álvaro. Y de Nicoletta, Nina y Micifuz, ineludibles félidos que nos acompañaron siempre: desde el desayuno hasta la hora de dormir. Pero hubo otros gatos: los de Marie-Jo, de los que hablamos mucho con ella en un restaurant de Polanco donde se apareció, para nuestra alegría y para saludarnos, Nicolás, el nieto de los Mutis y nuestro sobrino adorado. Y Casi, de Fabienne, amiga querida con quien cenamos en su nueva casa de Coyoacán y a la que Ida sometió durante horas a una suerte de examen oral sobre las últimas novedades literarias francesas. Casi proviene en línea directa del gato de los Paz que provocó el incendio de su departamento de la Calle Guadalquivir: hija de un incendiario, pues, pasa su vida, como Victoria en Villa Ocampo o Susana Soca en la calle San José de Montevideo, rodeada de libros y de pinturas y dibujos y grabados con los que a veces, cuando sale de sus largos períodos de ensimismamiento, dialoga hasta altas horas de la noche. Se sospecha que a veces escribe poemas: ¿influencia de Octavio, de Yesé Amory o de Gonzalo, que está tan presente en la calle de Inglaterra? También nos reencontramos con otro sobrino de nombre Nicolás: Nicolás Pereda, hoy multipremiado director de cine, siempre acompañado de su encantador hijo Matías y de Andrea, su esposa canadiense. Nunca podremos olvidarnos de él niño y sobre los hombros de Enrique en una playa de Atlántida (la Datitla de Neruda) y rumbo al agua al grito de "Chinchulín, Chinchulín". Una maravilla de persona, como todo el clan de la calle Zaragoza al que pertenece: su hermana Cata (y su esposo Eduardo, el de los "nombres propios") y sus padres Marcela y Carlos, a quienes nos une una vieja y fraterna amistad sin la que no sabríamos cómo vivir y seguir siendo quienes somos.

Lorenzo and Margarita's, and of course Marta's, untranslatable gratísima compañía, Fierro seeing his earth lit with salt, his verses ringing from Miami's SW95th St. to its downtown and into the sea, reaching to his fingers, provoking, unpacifying a rhinoceros almost dormant, just in time to catch a flight to Mexico, the land where his love is, and to dance the polka in lines leading nowhere, meaning nowhere yet known, therefore forwarding the charge towards lands some critic cannot know, until they're known. Those commentators, yes, they do drive somewhere, map in hand, like to Jones Beach or to Iguazú, conducing souvenir key chains.

Decapitate, heads and tails. "Heads," Rosencrantz successfully repeated ninety-two times, in the same way Fry's frequent demassified anagrams too often tend to nix hope, but then on the third day re-rearrange themselves to their original splendor. Picture Salto in 1879, then jump two years later to a two-year old Quiroga, promenaded down Uruguay St. in all his infancy. Someone surely died due to that Scheherazade number.

And from symmetry in digits back again to the inevitable era of the lexically palindromic: "Deems Ida's was diamond, Amon alit, or reify Fierro til a nomad, no maid, saw Sadi's meed." Unknowable invention of products enclosed in ferruginous bars demanding two days of thesis energy, all for seventeen prodded words. What Amon and Sadi must be saying now, not to mention Ida... and worse, Fierro. And of even more limited, and phonetic, creativity: "In train or other, too unforgettable. What a mall! Take us tea to mount air, rose, so in carloads he lets us."

Desdemona, Machado de Assis translated to Capitu, which Ida and María Elena considered an optimal name for a cat, though Bento would surely dissent opting for Grimalkin instead, perhaps later even deciding that to be a more appropriate name for a wife. But for more on prescriptivist names for cats... and descriptivist names for wives, ask Eduardo, authority on the proper, and on the improper.