O M A R P É R E Z
__________________________SIX POEMS
Translated by Kristin Dykstra & Omar Pérez
No doubt it is all a dream
Humanly speaking, but
how language thinks to say it, of its
own mind and feeling, always provocative.
I would have preferred to write prose.Poetry? Its materials,
so constant, simple,
aloof, specific.It costs so little and so much.
It occupies all of life,
but finds life only
in living.Music,
last word and communion
having no owner
having no greater reason or error
than we ourselves
the word suffers our pretensions.
The rest, silence.
A poem composed by Omar Pérez out of language from Robert Creeley's preface to his Selected Poems (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). Pérez wrote the original version of this poem in Spanish while preparing to translate several of Creeley's poems into Spanish for publication in Havana . This English version done by Kristin Dykstra simply retraces the preface.