ULISES PANIAGUA: The Poem Is the Tiger

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Be in Awe

Be in awe: language was given to us
What a marvellous neural mechanism
What a way to send ideas through the air

What magnificent undulations, these that bind
deep roots without our touching
What invisible magic in the frontal lobe
What a way to illuminate the intricate tapestry
of the exocerebrum

Marvel at yourself

We were granted this body
(nature knew what it was doing)
Each organ
each piece perfectly
arranged like a city:
an extended novel

A system that regulates the blood:
the water in the blood, the oxygen in the blood
the most profound and organic technology

Behold these wonders:
the viscera, contraptions of living matter
the lungs, the kidney, the womb of a mother:
mechanisms of flesh and substance

Be astonished

We make decisions every day
We improvise routes across thousands of streets
(familiar or foreign)
We are bifurcations
Infinite multiplication
unfolding into new permutations

Deep neurons
Connection with others’ connections
A network we call History

21 luminous grams (what we understand as the soul)
linked to 21 grams of so many others alive
and many, many dead

Apprentices of synapse who have already departed
Radiocommunications we set down on paper
In books: that great placenta of the world
Of our world

Be in awe

We were given a name
We were given water
We delight in the perception of light
We know that we are here, now
We sense life
(in a clumsy, primitive way
but we know)

Resign yourself

Artificial Intelligence will undoubtedly transcend us
The earth will go on without us
Green grass will sprout from our skin
We will become the pasture of new millennia

The seas and rivers will return
—in their infinite wisdom—
to reclaim what has always been theirs

We will sink into time
Far below
It is true

But for now, marvel at yourself
We are small exceptions
profane

Be in awe

Language was given to us
time, music
numbers, love
We were granted knowledge.

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The Other City

to Constantinos P. Kaváfis

You say, Kaváfis, you will go to another land, another sea—
and I long to know your land and your sea.

You say, Kaváfis, you will surely find a better city,
and I dream of Athens every night.

You swear that wherever you turn your eyes
you see only
the dark ruins of your life,
the many years you spent there—
or destroyed.

I seek my own desolation
in the ports and bars
you once haunted.

It is true, Kaváfis:
you will find no other land, no other sea.
Nor will I.

The names of my streets, of your streets,
will remain in us—
like a tattoo bleeding in half-light.

You will return to the Mexico City you never knew.
I will return to Ithaca, which I should never have left.

They will be the same windows.
Your old age will come in the same suburbs
(for me, perhaps the years will not be enough).

You will grow old in the same house, Kaváfis.
I will try to escape myself—
and alone, reading books,
shut inside a closet,
I will travel to a dark archipelago,
pasture of inner minotaurs.

This city is the same.
It will remain the same.
Our places will become homes of waiting.

My city is yours, Kaváfis.
Do not seek another—there is none—
no road, no ship for you.

The life you lost here,
in this Mexican Athens, you have destroyed.
I did the same
in that Greek Tenochtitlan.

I tell you I will go to another land, another sea—
and I know that even in death
you will long to know my land and my sea.

There is no other way, Kaváfis:
we will not find a better city
than the one we never left.

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The Poem Is the Tiger

The poem is the tiger,
that tiger that darkens the ice
beyond blood-soaked lungs
swollen with metaphor.

The poem is the tiger
that crushes the images of air,
that fierce delight of jaws
among luminous—or blunt—lines.

The poem is claws upon moss,
the leap through thorns,
the roar that echoes
its own imagined echo.

It is the liver of what it desires
yet cannot reach,
the gaze that touches night
and stretches toward its core,
the impossible
within its restless being.

The threshold—
the murky present.
Intuition—
that which goes unspoken
in the whiteness.

The poem is the white tiger
entering the entrails of snow.

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Ulises Paniagua (Mexico, 1976) Narrator and poet. Winner of the Gabriel García Márquez International Short Story Contest, Colombia (2019). Interviewed by Silvia Lemus on the program Tratos y retratos on Canal 22 (2022). In 2023, he was interviewed in an episode of the series La ciudad es mi letra on Capital 21 TV. Featured in the anthology Puente y Precipicio in Russia (2019). Author of two novels, nine short story collections, two books of chronicles, and seven poetry collections. His work has appeared in Nocturnario, Círculo de poesía, Punto en línea, Ígitur, Nueva York Poetry, Altazor, Algarabía, and Periódico de Poesía. Published in Revista Anestesia through his column Los textos del náufrago. Director of the International Colloquium on Poetry and Philosophy (supported by FCE). Former director of the Digital Horror Collection at Editora BGR (Spain). His work has been translated into English, Russian, Greek, Serbian, Czech, and Italian. He is also Latin American editor at Ars Notoria – The Art of the Noteworthy.