Robert Manzano | Poetry | Springhouse Journal

Robert Manzano was born in Ciego de Avila, Cuba in 1949. He’s a poet and essayist who has published more than 20 books. He won the Nicolas Guillen’s Mexico Prize in 2004; Nicolas Guillen’s Cuba Prize in 2005; Rosa Blanza Award in 2005; and the 2007 Samuel Feijoo’s Poetry and Environment Prize. He was a 2007 finalist at the Poetry Festival of Medellin, Colombia. Manzano was also a finalist at the Lira Festival in Cuenca, Equador in 2007. His poetry has been translated into Greek, English and Chinese. Manzano has given readings and been featured in conferences in Mexico, Venezuela, United States, Panama, China, Colombia, Argentina and Paraguay. He earned his Master’s Degree in Latin American Culture with a diploma in sociocultural investigation. Manzano has taught many postgraduate courses in literary and linguistic studies. He has also published general anthologies of Cuban poetry and is committed to promoting young authors. He has been an editor for several Cuban magazines and served as chief editor of AMNIOS, a Cuban poetry magazine.

Steven Reese is the author of five books of poetry and translation. He lives in Youngstown, Ohio, and teaches at Youngstown State University and in the Northeast Ohio MFA program.

So Where Are We Going to Go, If We Need So Much?

I Have Said That I Know a Space

Where Was That Tree from My Childhood?

So Where Are We Going to Go, If We Need So Much?

So where are we going to go, if we need so much? If everything uses up a sack of something, a tram of this and that, a sad tuning of utensils;

because there is no way, the hands aren't enough, not enough to add feet and knees, elbows, shoulders, head;

not enough: always an urgent prolongation, an inclusion larger or smaller, a longer fissure, a nearly planetary extension;

since we come in naked, and naked we leave, then we ought to have nakedness in between, but it isn't possible;

we go weaving, wrapping ourselves up, handcuffing ourselves, spinning and un-spinning, oh Penelope;

and we extend, we linger, we succeed ourselves, replete with buttons, horns, drills, oh Odysseus;

the bags of our fates are large, they grow like the cuttings from a miracle, and we live by gadgetry;

we depend upon arts that specialize, industries that specialize, countries that specialize;

our liberty lies in oil, salt, ink, petroleum, paper, phosphorus, antibiotics;

our existence is threaded through the man who brings the garlic, the hydraulics dealer, the mechanic of images and of teeth;

oh Edison, how is it possible? where are we going to go, needing as we do? where to, if we are like this, if we demand like this?

how many various types of little spoons, how many little knives for feet, for bread, for fish?

how many mirrors and creams, how many pliers and emeries, how many titles and records, how many gallons, lists;

how many ropes and diadems, detectors and lenses, weapons and drinks, planes and ornamental combs, spatulas and missiles;

and we've forgotten the symbolic shades of sky, the savor of dew or the soaked grass below the hips of love;

how do they smell, the banks of virgin rivers, the prawns of the small streams, the lover's hands inside leaves of solemn sassafras;

consider well, Thersites, that everything's exhaustible, unsustainable, weak, discardable, but it has a perfect finish to it;

consider how everything glows in perfect lines, but it's there to be wolfed down, there for the fleeting parenthesis of a month;

where are the carpenters who raised that solid furniture, those tables that crossed the waters of the centuries like ships;

where are those singular artifacts that formed no chains upon chains, that were unconnected to each other like mad links;

oh Pluto, to live for such things great and small, urgent and lovely, fragile and held jointly, what ends, what goes on;

with how many racemes do we live, in what ferulas, tree that never stops branching toward the totality of wind.

I Have Said That I Know a Space

I have said that I know a space. A space that flows in orbits, cubic and rushing. With brilliant spectrums, busied, hectic. With noble happenings, green, gradual. With bushes and beasts, horses and foam, with corn and light posts. Nets of time, and from there the hour climbing like a heron for the blazing vault. Cadmus sowing his teeth, the man, in his space. I'm here, with my space. At the bottom. Coming from the bottom. I go over, like a Sumerian scholar, the crowded signs. Myself, I am a tree, that which sets out at dawn, and returns at night. I choose for myself, without prior inquiry, my scope. I use the right to join vertebrae and dust, memory and voice, blood and sap. The arms I came with, I'll go with. But they were given me for constant addings on. And for the exercise of a blue saturation, of a slow elaboration of the ring. I am here, with my space. At the bottom. Coming from the bottom. I am a simple soldier whose duties are dust's. No one tells me: Take this down, Hesiod. I placed myself in the line, eyes wide open, the moment I sat down in my own bones.

Where Was That Tree from My Childhood?

Where was that tree from my childhood, joining me to those who will die before me, to those who have already died, clasping my children to my body, we look down. With five plumb lines, with fourteen rails, with twenty deposits of basalt, with cranes already filled with anguish and hope. I put that weight of my eyes in the looks of my children. Seeking with the blood of my lineage. Everybody, in a ring of helixes, where was that tree from childhood, do you remember? We stood at the edge of the absent; I, gnawing words inside, clamoring with the crude bellows of sense, and all of us demanding, without moving our lips, immersing our eyes: Go! Come back! Shouting thus. Thus, in mid-wind. Thus we linked elbows. Thus I gathered my children, like buds, around me. Go! Come back! The sun was burning above, burning like a coin. Over the brow of my parents, its fruits were dwindling. Over my brow, they decayed. Already, above my children, the air was a funnel of silence. This happened in the place of my childhood where the tree was growing huge as a shipyard, that knew how to appear each year like a bowl of sweetness, that carried the birds like a patriarch. We're looking down with tendons straining: Go! Come back! And we saw it, opening like an ark on the plain.