Robin Myers is a young poet and translator from New York, currently living in Mexico City. For her, writing a poem is like an itch that comes “sometimes like a line, sometimes an image, sometimes just a nebulous question or concern or juxtaposition”. If we can learn something from Myers’ work, it’s the fact that poetry can help us understand life itself. In the poem “The Metaphysics of Pedro the Ice Cream Man”, we can feel the immensity of the Universe and all those deep-down and sky-high places we´ll never meet.
THE METAPHYSICS OF PEDRO THE ICE CREAM MAN
The way I see it is, heaven is just another world
and I’m not from there.
I saw this show on TV about deep-sea fish,
so deep they’re almost not fish at all,
just spikes and light bulbs, glowing in strange places.
We can’t even go there, except in machines.
We try to breathe there and the water would fill us,
the dark would crush us. While all those fish
swim around with their blinkers and teeth,
eating whatever it is that they eat,
and all our talking and running do nothing for us,
and all the shadows and shimmery stuff
and the fishes’ invisible food makes more sense than we do.
Why should the sky be any different?
Another country we have to die to get to,
and where land doesn’t matter anymore, or blood
or bones, and we have to learn to be like air
after all these years of walking.
I light a candle by my bed at night and that’s
the closest to a deep-sea fish as I’ll get to be.
I let my hat go on a windy day
and maybe that’s a little like flying, a little like having
a spirit, or being one. I never found it.
Maybe it’ll get somewhere before me,
maybe I’ll stay here without it.
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Published in the journal Enizagam, in Amalgama / Conflations (Ediciones Antílope, Mexico), and in Lo demás / Else (Kriller71 Ediciones, Spain; Zindo & Gafuri, Argentina).
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Photos by Drew Wilson.