Feel Puma

Poems

Ray Gonzalez

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780826361691
• eBook ISBN: 9780826361707
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Poesie

In Feel Puma, Ray Gonzalez traces his love of reading, philosophy, and learning with poems constantly in conversation—with each other, with texts by other writers and the writers themselves, with world history and his personal history and people he has encountered. Woven over three sections, this unique collection is a complex and gorgeous dive into creativity and the inner life of a poet at the height of his craft.

PART ONE

LAS RAMAS

I began to listen inside the stanza of a poem and heard individual sounds as gripa or airlo or ar calling to each other. A gripa is a creature that cries out, an airlo a floating wing. I don’t know what an ar might be, though it tunes itself. What kind of union did these sounds proclaim? Hearing these cries put me on the other side of the poem, where growth resides. I moved among forceful sounds in my first attempt at the poem. What would happen if a gripa left the poet behind? Decisions about the language would be based on the after-darkness following the encounter. Radiant light between words fertilizes syllables around it. For length, I chose eight lines, which permit a speaker to make his move. It was the sound of my open mouth, la rama coming out, the word related to a Spanish word for root. The notes that fell off las ramas allowed the shadows in the poem to encircle the throat of the speaker, as in roots spreading around a tree trunk, this situation changing constantly because the more you add sound to the poem, new words appear on their own, thus entering the text as the speaker pulls las ramas out of his chest before finishing the poem.

FEEL PUMA

I want to write, but I feel puma

CÉSAR VALLEJO

Feel puma when the black

animal draws near, its shadow

growing in the written snow,

the blossom opening in rivers

and flooded dams where

mountain ice freezes

the stalking tongue.

Feel puma the claws of fate.

Feel puma when the black

creature fills the arms and

legs with instinct for the prey,

plays stone plays anvil plays god,

blasts roads in a ruined country,

the hunter entangled in the trees,

unable to write what he saw.

Feel puma when the black

figure disappears, puts faith

in scorpions and birds, a white

landscape marking magic with

plants and roots from the tree

of quenching silence—the notes

of the unborn.

THE GATE OF WRITING

opens when the cottonwoods don’t

sway together any longer, a voice

rising to speak past the gate,

the text given a chance to become

as dark as the earth, a secret existence

erased from pure sentences,

the response driving the open palm

of the traveler to examine the stars

as if something guards the entryway,

a form moving toward the resolution

left out of the dream, words from

the past scattered beyond accuracy,

eating its light so no one rescues

the drowned and nothing is written

to bring a prophecy where the gate

is left open and the faithful swim back

and close it, tomorrow’s paragraphs

a different story without an end.

THE BOOK

I

The book is invisible.

It has been read many times.

It is illustrated

but can never be seen.

The book opens to one blank page

and the story begins there.

It is missing a page or two.

The tale is being changed.

The book belongs to no one because

its sentences erase words, though

it remembers each reader.

Some of its pages are bent.

It sits open under a lamp.

Its chapters are longer than the table.

The book is filed on the shelf with

its cover like any other cover.

It offers readers one reading

in a lifetime.

The book is never finished.

The ending always comes first.

II

What if it didn’t exist?

Would it be the book

of the flat desert instead?

What if the mountain did

not wish to be written about?

How could it tower over

the words if its shadows

went beyond the paragraph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Acknowledgments