Making Literature Travel

Written by Albert Forns.
Translated from Catalan by Gustavia Yvonne Kendall.

Poems from the collection Ultracolors.

***

On Kawara

White postcards,
Maps marked:
Today I’ve never seen
Today I’ve never done
Today I’ve never been.

I am the date, the telegram.
I am the day we’ve met again.

To count the years of a millennium a million times over
To repeat, and not advance this as courage.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

We’re at the now of each day
And all its growing plants and greenery.

As always, you’ve turned away from me
Just one meter farther, the exact distance
That makes it all such a domestic mechanism.

They don’t cry out in exaltation, in hyperfeeling.
They’re just toxic
The levels of pollution and life expectancy.

John Cage

Weeks of closet basics
synthetic silences

Scraping loose strings
delayed by poetry.

Forevering interludes
Old hits play, but never mine.

Merce Cunningham

I pass from holding you
to these winter evergreens

An alarm and minuscule electric routines.

Where are those hours, lost, perdu?
No one will ever return them to you.

Cy Twombly

I like to find that one, that specific painting, the one that leaves me breathless for a
/ while,
so that, for a few seconds, I am the white canvas with my pain exploding red.

Mark Rothko

All but time is missing,
Scenery without inquiry.

The “there’s no there there”
when it’s literal
and omnipresent.

Zhuangzi

You dream that you dream and you wake and all is as before and you wake and all is
/ just
the same as it was.

***

Featured image: Mark Rothko, Purple, White and Red (1953); JR P / Flickr