Arturo Desimone

 

I Cannot Live Here in Nethenmark

I cannot live here,
in Low Country
where the words “the soul"
are bad macho
whiskeyed words,
as forbidden as "the soil"
though meaning behind the soil
never lost favor, unlike the soul.

Nor can I live
in nation statements,
as I am a resilient but a vague man

Vagueness breaks—
falls swiftly through
cracks, spaces in between
nation statements in that language
as vague as cumulus
and harsh as yellow suns in the lake.

I cannot live
here,
among buses of the well-fed unsmiling

a bus to tension, a bus to relaxation
(in The Language: Spanning. Ontspanning.)

where, I know, there grow
unruly cells of black
isolation
without mountains,

isolation
without huts
by the sorrow beach,
the soil where I walked
up and down as a child
next to a wild boar,
black as upstart-cells,
he trailed along my side,
his tusks still smelling of envy
he called himself Miguel Daniel,
said he was
my father.

 

Arturo Desimone was born and raised in Aruba (Dutch Caribbean) of immigrant origins foreign to the island (an Argentinean father and Russian-Polish mother) at the age of 20 he emigrated from Aruba to the Netherlands. After 6 years he left the Netherlands to lead a nomadic way of life better enabling writing fiction, poetry and making drawings. For now he is based in Buenos Aires Argentina, his grandparents' home town. His poetry and fiction have been in Hinchas de Poesia, at the blog A Tunisian Girland in The Acentos Review. His life-story was recently the topic of a news story in an edition of Argentina's Clarin newspaper, the column by Laura Ramos was titled "El Turista Revolucionario."