In Damen - Frank Báez

In Damen there’s a bar

where the employees loosen their ties

and drink beer with girls who steal

poetry from the bookstore on the corner.

Sitting there, I wrote a poem

I like a lot.

A week later I went back and tried

to write another poem

that didn’t work at all.

And it’s about how several days ago

I saw a sunset over the city

and said to myself I’ve got to write a poem.

Or there was the Monday I saw a bird

hit the office window again and again

and promised to dedicate a poem to him.

Or the time I was following the girl

who paints her body orange

on Michigan Avenue

and she got wise to me and running after her

I shouted I’ve got to write a poem.

And now I’m writing while the bartender is laughing and smoking

among the employees and the girls who’re laughing and smoking

with stolen books in their handbags.

And as I write this poem keeps getting fuller and fuller of people I don’t know, of readers I’ve never seen, of my European readers, my Chinese and Arab readers, my readers in Argentina… and suddenly the poem is like a bar where people are smoking and shouting and the only person who doesn’t belong here is me.

John Keats wrote that there’s nothing less poetic than a poet.

The poet is to poetry what pipes are to water.

By that I mean the poet just writes,

uses words, sets them up here,

takes them down there, strokes them

the way a mason lays brick and spreads the stucco on,

since a poet builds houses out of words

for readers, the ones who’re hypocrites and leave without paying

and sometimes stick a shotgun in their mouths only because they need

what’s inside a poem;

to those who’re searching, who’re suffering, to the evicted,

the poet gives shelter in his poems —

to sadsacks, to lovers, to whores, to crazies,

to retired policemen…

and as soon as the poet finishes his house

it no longer belongs to him

and he goes off to build more houses somewhere else.

Night is falling now in Damen.

The wind plays outside,

pushing the park-swings.

Lights come on behind the windows.

---

Frank Báez (born 1978) Dominican Republic

Translated by Hoyt Rogers

Source: The Fortnightly Review, May 2014