I, TOO, AM ULRICH
by Carlos Pintado
Without attributes
(tempted to say without qualities),
I am the dead man
who gazes at death
without recognizing it:
death, a circle small
and dreadful,
that burning circle,
flickering,
almost unseen
revealing
(all at once)
every face
and every thing
I’ve loved passionately
and transiently,
or so it seems.
Without attributes, which is to say,
without grasping at salvation,
without a love story
triumphant at the end of days,
without a light
to cross that shadowed room
where the boy I was
weeps and bleeds and begs and screams
don’t leave me alone
don’t leave me alone
don’t leave me alone
and I,
not knowing what to do,
cannot save him,
and go laughing into the gas chamber.
That’s right. I laugh.
Who will stop me,
I, who laugh in a gas chamber?
No. You can do nothing to me.
You can do nothing. Understand that.
I have no throat to slit;
my life is left behind,
far away,
so far away
like those tiny figures drawing close,
so slowly,
in a landscape out of memory.
I am my own incest.
Didn’t you know every act of love is a suicide?
Come. Put your finger to my lips.
Strange gesture to silence words.
Mute gesture, as if we swallow sweet poison.
Why are you shocked at my laughter?
Where to cast off this sham of a body, a self?
It is a rabid shadow-animal that walks beside. Where to leave it?
I know I’m practicing my farewell.
Mid-escape, I give notice. I know.
Why can’t you see?
I thought all this was life:
these forest clearings,
these charred bodies,
these lips I kiss with passion,
this craze for twilight walks in the park,
these children who go to slaughtered families,
these are not life.
Why can’t you understand?
Without attributes, yes. It’s true.
At the mercy of all things, like a leaf.
Who will go to these places of pain for me?
Who will hold out his hands,
bring them to his chest, turn his back,
close his eyes, and think:
“Soon their fingers will pull
the trigger, and I will open my eyes to see
how they have fired on me,
not knowing what I’ll do next”?
From Nine Coins by Carlos Pintado, Winner of The National Poetry Series' Paz Prize for Poetry
CARLOS PINTADO is a Cuban-American writer, playwright, and award-winning poet who immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s. His book Autorretrato en azul received the prestigious Sant Jordi International Prize for Poetry, and his book El azar y los tesoros was a finalist for Spain’s Adonáis Prize in 2008. His work has been translated into English, Italian, French, Turkish, and Portuguese, and has been published in The New York Times, World Literature Today, The American Poetry Review, and The New York Times Magazine.