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I owed my Opus Dei colleagues a visit, and they introduced me to the Opus Dei publishers and the principals of the Opus schools and the Rector of the University, which is also run by Opus Dei and all of them showed an interest in my work as literary critic, poet and teacher, and they invited me to publish a book with them, the Spanish are so generous, and punctilious too, for the very next day I signed a contract

The shoemaker’s plan was to buy the hill and convert it into a monument dedicated to the heroes of the Empire. Not just the heroes of the past and the heroes of the present, but also the heroes of the future. In other words the hill would serve both as a cemetery and as a museum. How would it serve as a museum? Well, each hero the Empire had produced would have his life-size statue erected on the hill

And HECTOR died like everyone else
He was in charge of the Trojans
But a spear found out the little patch of white
Between his collarbone and his throat
Just exactly where a man’s soul sits
Waiting for the mouth to open
He always knew it would happen
He who was so boastful and anxious
And used to nip home deafened by weapons
To stand in full armour in the doorway
Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running

Like smoke leaving the earth vanishing up
When a town is under attack on a far away island
All day in a trance of war men murder each other
But at dusk silence only the fingers of fires
Lifting their questions to the mainland
Is there anyone there please help

Like ADRESTUS and AMPHIUS
Everyone knew they were going to die
They were the sons of Merops the prophet
He begged them to stay at home but the couldn’t listen
Their own ghosts were calling them to Troy
Immaculate in clean linen
They set out together but Death
Was already walking to meet them

Like when two winds want a wood
The south wind and the east wind
Both pull at the trees’ arms
And the sound of smooth-skinned cornel whipping to and fro
And oak and ash batting long sticks together
Is a word from another world

Orsilochus and Crethon grew restless
They had shallow stony eyes
Always starring at the pulling sea
And they were the grandsons of a river
Famous Alpheus whose muscular waters
Wind around Pylos
But those cold blue arms couldn’t keep them
As soon as they were old enough
They took a ship to Troy their story
Finishes here in darkness

The first to die was PROTESILAUS
A focused man who hurried into darkness
With forty black ships leaving the land behind
Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs
Where the grass gives growth to everything
Pyrasus Iton Pteleus Antron
He died in mid-air jumping to be first ashore
There was his house half-built
His wife rushed out clawing her face
Podarcus his altogether less impressive brother
Took ov

Storms

We stayed there until dawn, the smell of hay coming up on the wind. Her telling me the way my father’s hands bruised her for fifteen years, the difference between loving and liking somebody. How she didn’t like me anymore than him because I had the same cruel eyes.

Antarctica

As a child, she had been told that Hell was different for everyone, your own worst possible scenario. ‘I always thought He’ll would be unbearably cold, a place where you stayed half-frozen but you never quite lost consciousness and you never really felt anything,’ she said. ‘There’d be nothing, only a cold sun and the Devil there, watching you.’

We went to Agua Prieta, to the Agua Prieta cemetery. From La Buena Vida to Trincheras first, and then from Trincheras to Pueblo Nuevo, Santa Ana, San Ignacio, Ímuris, Cananea, and Agua Prieta, right on the Arizona Border.
On the other side of the border was Douglas, an American town, and in between was customs and the border police. On the other side of Douglas, about forty miles northwest, was Tombstone

Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone into in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man’s memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy.

Problems. Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.

Have you ever heard the theory of Easter Island? According to the theory, Chile is the real Easter Island. You know: to the east we’re bordered by the Andes, to the north by the Atacama Desert, to the south by Antarctica, and to the west by the Pacific Ocean. We were born on Easter Island and our moai are ourselves, the Chileans, looking in bewilderment toward the four points of the compass.

THE WAY IT IS
William Stafford (1914–1993)

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

It was Claudia’s voice and then Ulises’s voice, but not their normal everyday voices, or at least not Claudia’s everyday voice. It didn’t take me long to realise that they were reading poems. They were listening to Cat Stevens and reading short poems, deadpan and sad, luminous and ambiguous, slow and quick as lightning, poems about a cat rubbing itself up against Baudelaire’s legs

EARTH’S EMBROIDERY

With the ink of its showers and rains,
with the quill of its lightening,
with the hand of its clouds,
winter wrote a letter upon the garden , in purple and blue.
No artist could ever conceive the like of that.
And this is why the earth, grown jealous of the sky,
embroidered stars in the folds of the flower-beds.

–Solomon Ibn Gabirol (c.1022–c.1070)
Translated by T Carmi

He had some Peruvian friends who gave him work occasionally, a group of Peruvian poets, probably poets in name only, since as everyone knows living in Paris wears you down and erodes your vocation if it isn’t ironclad. It coarsens you, it pushes you into oblivion. At least that happens to a lot of Latin Americans I know. I’m not trying to say it was true of Ulises, but it was definitely true of the Peruvians.

A HYMN TO VENUS (Extract)
—Sappho (c. 630–c. 570 BCE)
Translated by Ambrose Philips

O Venus, beauty of the skies,
To whom a thousand temples rise,
Gayly false in gentle smiles,
Full of love-perplexing wiles,
O goddess! from my heart remove
The wasting cares and pains of love.

If ever thou hast kindly heard
A song in soft distress preferred,
Propitious to my tuneful vow,

There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake

The story he told me wasn’t much different from what my friend had told me. The fight had been about Neruda and Parra, about the validity of their respective poetic visions, and yet there was a new element to the story that the director told (and I knew that he was telling me the truth): when he fought with my friend and my friend couldn’t come up with anything else to say in his desperate defence of Neruda

93 PERCENT STARDUST

We have calcium in our bones,
iron in our veins,
carbon in our souls,
and nitrogen in our brains.
93 percent stardust,
with souls made of flames,
we are all just stars
that have people names

—Nikita Gill (b. 1987)

A MAIDEN
—Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

Oh if I were the velvet rose
Upon the red rose vine,
I’d climb to touch his window
And make his casement fine.

And if I were the bright-eyed bird
That twitters on the tree
All day I’d sing my love for him
Till he should harken me.

But since I am a maiden
I go with downcast eyes,
And he will never hear the songs
That he has turned to sighs.

The Crystal Gazer
—Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

I shall gather myself into myself again,
I shall take my scattered shelves and make them one,
Fusing them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.

I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent,
Watching the future come and the present go,
And the little shifting pictures of people rushing
In restless self-importance to and fro.

I STOOD UPON A STAR

—Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

I stretched my mind until I stood
Out in space, upon a star;
I looked, and saw the flying earth
Where seven planets are.

Delicately interweaving
Like fireflies on a moist June night
The planetoids among the planets
Played for their own delight

I watched earth putting off her winter
And slipping into green;
I saw the dark side of the moon
No man has ever seen.

It was the crowds themselves, though, that separated Yavy from Lor, the swelling mayhem that carried her and their children one way, and he another, as if they were floating above high blue black waves, slowly being torn apart on different currents. He fought, grabbed and clawed with his hands to move against the tide of people coming towards him and briefly he caught glimpses of them up ahead,

As he runs, his tears cut against the cold wind. Jakob – a half-blood gypsy boy of Roma and Yenish. Barely eight years old. He moves fast, pushed by fear that keeps him running, night after night. Pushed by loss that slips into the raw meat of him, into the pulsing of blue veins, the slab of his liver, the sponge of his right lung, stabbing there with a pain that is the only thing that he recognises.

Often she would take Lor to the antique market in town that, now that the Great War had ended, was overflowing with lost and unclaimed objects, with widow’s wares. They never came home empty-handed. The house was filled with silver spoons, Worcester China, George III silver-shelled ladles, a baluster coffee pot, boxes of war memorabilia, a dead soldier’s medals.

There’s too much of the Hamlet in every one of us; I thought and schemed and brooded, but I couldn’t screw up my courage to act. Time and again I rehearsed all that I might – that I must – say, and time after time I could not bring myself to the scratch. I saw in anticipation all too vividly how he would receive me. He would sneer at my interference and bludgeon down my arguments.

To a middle-aged don, as I might describe myself, or to an old don, as I might almost be described, there is no place more pleasant than Common Room, no hour more wholly pleasurable than that spent in it immediately after dinner. For here the Fellows of St Thomas’s, having dined, settled down to enjoy the comfort of port and dessert, of coffee and cigars. I had come, as I grew older, to look forward all day to that