A few weeks ago I lost my dog. He was my companion of 14 years
and I felt disoriented, out of daily routine and missing the primordial.
So, this morning, as I often do on Sundays, I read poetry
and forgot the sunshine outside my window.
César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda were my choices for today. I
started with a simple yet now most affectionate poem by Neruda about his dog.
It read:
My dog has died.
I buried him in the
garden
next to a rusted old
machine
I have buried four of my dogs over the years. But never next
to a rusted old machine. Yet the feeling is the same. It is the departure from
a residence in the daily. Not life necessarily, but a distancing from the tempo
man and dog establish for themselves.
A residence in the quotidian. The city. The mountain. The
earth.
Perhaps Neruda’s most memorable poems about the human
condition are in his collection titled Residencia en la Tierra or “residence on earth”. It is a collection
about departure and alienation; about loneliness without knowing the void that
surrounds us; and, it is about the promises we hoped earthly life would give us
but no poet ever found it.
And that took me to César Vallejo.
In Black Stone on
White Stone, the Peruvian poet writes:
I will die in Paris
with a rainstorm,
on a day I already
remember,
I will die in
Paris—and I don't shy away—
perhaps on a Thursday,
as today is, in autumn
Translated by Rebecca Seiferle, I love those lines somehow
common to the work of many poets regarding the process of their death. Yet, Vallejo
has already experienced his departure as a resident of the earth since he remembers
the day he died.
Perhaps departure is different from death.
… For me Neruda has never been apocalyptic but one who
celebrated lovers and perhaps love. Vallejo however, deciphered what he had not yet read – the joy of the primordial.
Instead, he navigated the catacomb of days:
There is an empty
place
in my metaphysical shape
that no one can reach:
a cloister of silence
that spoke on the edge of a fire
On the day I was born,
God was sick.
And that is what my dog helped me avoid.
May 12, 2019
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2109
