From El Big Zoo
after Nicolas Guillen
Caribbean
Where else would you keep the sea?
It’s never exactly where you
want it to be.
Here in the big zoo.
A salty, questionable animal
a belly packed with micro
plastics.
Grey fins, like a hurricane.
It sings in the drifting.
it sings while it kills you.
*
Nicolas Guillen was a black
Cuban poet (1902-1989). He was prolific
and successful for much of his career. Jailed and exiled by the Batista regime,
he was feted by the Revolution, and was Cuba’s most popular poet for many
years. His major works include Motivos
de son (1930), Songoro Cosongo (1931) and Elegias (1958).
Guitarra
They were hunting for music under a full moon.
They were pale and delicate and
promiscuous.
They were elegant .
This guitar they brought home,
at
least it’s better than the last
one.
You can hear its grain thrum
with the old songs
and this time you didn’t have
to fuck anybody for it.
Ah, all the old wings go
flutter
flutter.
Put that thing in the case, if
there is
a case, and let it dream for a
while.
You can play the other one.
*
His El Gran Zoo (1967) is not
often regarded as a major work, but it is well-loved nonetheless. The original is short, funny and sarcastic.
Its vocabulary is straightforward and its rhythms clear, virtues that complement
my limited Spanish. I was also
interested because it was, sort of, about animals and I worked for many years
in natural history museums.
Parrot
Repeatable bird
sleeps in their cage.
Alone, in its tiny cage
made all by itself
by itself.
*
I came across the book, a
ragged paperback copy, in a bookseller’s stall in the main square of Old Habana
in 2003. The bookseller was reluctant, but eventually I traded three
much-heavier novels for the small book of poetry. A lot easier to carry around. I spent the rest of my holiday coming up with
a crude literal translation.
Great Bear
Remember sputnik?
It went out and caught a bear.
The stars on its skin are the
bones
of light.
And out there
the light doesn’t always find
you.
*
This wasn’t my first trip to
Cuba. First on an educational tour, and several times with my partner and then
on my own. It was warm, uncrowded, the beachfront mojitos were cheap, there was
music everywhere. Once I bought a cheap
tres from a musician in a little bar and brought it back to Ottawa. I was
pretty sure the top strings were made out of wire pulled out an old phone. It snapped within a month, the strings pulling
it apart in the dry winter air.
Anaconda
A big snake coils and uncoils
among the abandoned stones.
Its head is a shovel.
It scrapes the light off the
moon
with its thin lips when no one
is looking.
Here, it says
here are your stones back.
*
I had gotten to know some of the staff at the
Natural History Museum in Habana and had started bringing older-model laptops
and other supplies to my friends there. The last time I arrived, my luggage was
thoroughly searched. They pulled out the
two computers, bundles of paper, clusters of markers. ‘I’m a writer’ I said. They rolled their eyes
and waved me through.
Speculators
Day traders and fund managers
and the rest
of the bail-out pets.
Bird-like wash-outs
hedge their cages - they sit
there and speculate..
Bigwigs and vultures want to be
cruel and observable
at the same time – so they eat
their young.
The mad one with a tail of
ashes
lashes its past to get off.
And the so-called hi-fliers
that suck blood and drift
like shadows over the sea.
Give them the cages. Let them
trade their feathers
and go broke quickly.
*
But maybe that’s why this time
my luggage didn’t make it. My flight was from Ottawa, with a stop at Varadero,
then on to Habana. My luggage deplaned
at Varadero. I called the airline and
they said they had it and would forward it to me in three days, I just had to
let them know where I was staying.
Rivers
Here's the cage of snakes,
coiled around themselves
like the springs of ten-ton
trucks.
And still dreaming of their
true homes.
In the tributary system with
its slaves.
In the vocabulary with its lost
tribes.
In the long legs, and their
hurries.
Kids laugh and throw them
lettuce
and then the whole forest.
The great rivers wake up. They
swallow everything.
*
So I found a casa particular
and stayed in Habana longer than expected. Usually I stayed east of the city,
at one of the crumbling Soviet-era hotels on the Playas del Este. This time I
was planning to visit the eastern tip of the island, but it would be better
with clean underwear. I waited for the airline to call.
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Monty Reid is an Ottawa poet. His most recent book is Meditatio Placentae (Brick), and his latest chapbook is Vertebrata from Montreal's Turret House Press. Recent poems have appeared in The Typescript, The Pi Review, +doc, Peter F. Yacht Club, Ice Floe Press, Pinhole, Best Canadian Poetry 2024 and elsewhere. He was the Managing Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine for several years and the Director of Ottawa's VerseFest for almost a decade. He can be found on Facebook and Bluesky, with vestigial remains on Twitter
He has worked on the Zoo
project, off and on, for many years. Over that time, versions of the poems have
appeared in many magazines, such as CV2, Dusie, Drain, The
Goose, and elsewhere. New Brunswick artist Suzanne Hill illustrated the
entire manuscript.