Battery
When everything around me is collapsing,
I think about artillery and maps,
When everything around me is collapsing,
I think about artillery and maps,
about the perfect world of maps, and how
reality transforms that perfect world.
Someone picks a target, and someone
looks for reference points in the landscape,
the tower of a church, a mountain peak,
to gauge the levels with exact precision
before he lays out the trajectory.
At tables, those who use the formulas
to find the range, the proper charge and angle,
immerse themselves in calculations.
The gunners start their work at the cannons
in a feverish, mechanical routine,
while the observers wait impatiently
to see the cloud that shows the first impact.
When the order to fire is finally given
everything is excitement and turmoil,
each man is responsible for his part
and no one is responsible for the wreckage.
Julio Marínez Mesanza was born in Madrid in 1955. His books include Europa, Las trincheras, and Soy en mayo, which appeared in 2007.
Don Bogen is the author of four books of poetry, most recently An Algebra (University of Chicago Press, 2009). His translations of the work of Julio Martínez Mesanza have appeared in Boston Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and other journals. He recently received a Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Arts Institute, for his work on Martínez Mesanza. The Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati, he is spending winter and spring of 2011 on a Fulbright at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre in Belfast.
