The 10 best poems by Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño (1953 - 2003) is one of the best-known Chilean literary figures of the last fifty years.

This well-known writer and poet, who died in 2003, is especially recognized for having written novels such as "distant star" either "The Savage Detectives". He is also known for being one of the main founders of the infrarealist movement, which sought the free expression of one's own vital position regardless of the conventions and limits imposed by society.

The path of this author, despite the fact that he perhaps received greater recognition for his novels, would begin hand in hand with his works lyrical, mainly poems in which the author expressed his emotions and thoughts regarding a great diversity of topics. And in order to be able to observe and deepen his way of seeing things, in this article We present a brief selection of Roberto Bolaño's poems.

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Ten poems by Roberto Bolaño

Below we leave you with a dozen of Roberto Bolaño's poetic works, which speak to us about topics as diverse as love, poetry or death, from a sometimes tragic point of view.

1. romantic dogs

At that time I was twenty years old and I was crazy. He had lost a country but had won a dream. And if he had that dream, the rest didn't matter. Neither work nor pray, nor study at dawn with the romantic dogs. And the dream lived in the emptiness of my spirit.

A wooden room, in shadows, in one of the lungs of the tropics. And sometimes I turned inside myself and visited the dream: a statue eternalized in liquid thoughts, a white worm writhing in love.

A runaway love. A dream within a dream. And the nightmare told me: you will grow. You will leave behind the images of pain and the labyrinth and you will forget. But at that time grow might be a crime. I am here, I said, with the romantic dogs and here I am going to stay.

This poem, published in the book of the same name, tells us about youth and madness and the lack of control of the passions with which it is usually associated. We also see a possible reference to the fall of Chile into the hands of Pinochet and his emigration to Mexico.

2. Muse

She was more beautiful than the sun and I was not yet sixteen. Twenty-four have passed and he is still by my side. Sometimes I see her walking on the mountains: he is the guardian angel of our prayers. It is the dream that returns with the promise and the whistle. The whistle that calls us and that loses us. In her eyes I see the faces of all my lost loves.

Ah, Musa, protect me, I tell him, in the terrible days of incessant adventure. Never get away from Me. Watch my steps and the steps of my son Lautaro. Let me feel the tips of your fingers again on my back, pushing me, when everything is dark, when everything is lost. Let me hear the whistle again.

I am your faithful lover although sometimes sleep separates me from you. You are also the queen of dreams. You have my friendship every day and someday your friendship will pick me up from the wasteland of oblivion. Well, even if you come when I go, deep down we are inseparable friends.

Musa, wherever I go you go. I saw you in the hospitals and in the line of political prisoners. I saw you in the terrible eyes of Edna Lieberman and in the alleys of the gunmen. And you always protected me! In defeat and scratch.

In sick relationships and cruelty, you were always with me. And even though the years go by and the Roberto Bolaño of the Alameda and the Crystal Library transforms, becomes paralyzed, becomes dumber and older, you will remain just as beautiful. More than the sun and the stars.

Muse, wherever you go I go. I follow your radiant trail through the long night. Regardless of the years or the disease. No matter the pain or the effort I have to make to follow you. Because with you I can cross the great desolate spaces and I will always find the door that leads to me. return the Chimera, because you are with me, Muse, more beautiful than the sun and more beautiful than the stars.

The author speaks to us in this poem about his poetic inspiration, his muse, seeing it in various fields and contexts.

3. Rain

It rains and you say it's as if the clouds were crying. Then you cover your mouth and quicken your pace. As if those scrawny clouds were crying? Impossible. But then, where does this rage come from, this desperation that will lead us all to hell?

Nature hides some of her ways in Mystery, her stepbrother. So this afternoon that you consider similar to an afternoon of the end of the world sooner than you think It will seem just a melancholic afternoon, an afternoon of solitude lost in memory: the mirror of the Nature.

Or you will forget it. Neither the rain, nor the crying, nor your steps that resound on the path of the cliff matter; Now you can cry and let your image fade into the windshields of the cars parked along the Paseo Marítimo. But you can't miss.

This poetry reflects a feeling of strangeness, sadness, fear and helplessness derived from the observation of the rain, which also symbolizes pain and tears. This is an element that frequently appears in the author's work that he also tends to use as a point of union between the real and the unreal.

4. strange dummy

Strange mannequin from a Metro store, what a way of observing me and feeling myself beyond any bridge, looking at the ocean or a huge lake, as if he expected adventure and love from him. And can a girl's cry in the middle of the night convince me of the usefulness of my face or veil the instants, red-hot copper plates the memory of love denying itself three times for the sake of another species of love. And so we harden without leaving the aviary, devaluing ourselves, or we return to a tiny house where a woman is waiting for us sitting in the kitchen.

Strange mannequin from a Metro store, what a way to communicate with me, single and violent, and to sense myself beyond everything. You only offer me buttocks and breasts, platinum stars and sparkling sexes. Don't make me cry on the orange train, or on the escalators, or suddenly going out to March, not even when you imagine, if you imagine, my steps as an absolute veteran dancing again through the gorges.

Strange mannequin from a Metro store, just as the sun and the shadows of the skyscrapers lean, you will lean your hands; just as colors and colored lights go out, your eyes will go out. Who will change your dress then? I know who will change your dress then.

This poem, in which the author converses with a mannequin from a subway store, speaks to us of a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, the search for sexual pleasure as an escape route and the progressive fading out of delusion.

5. The Ghost of Edna Lieberman

All your lost loves visit you in the darkest hour. The dirt road that led to the asylum unfolds again like Edna Lieberman's eyes, as only her eyes could rise above the cities and shine.

And Edna's eyes shine again for you behind the ring of fire that was once the path of earth, the path you walked at night, round trip, over and over again, looking for it or perhaps looking for your shade.

And you wake up quietly and Edna's eyes are there. Between the moon and the ring of fire, reading his favorite Mexican poets. And Gilberto Owen, have you read it? say your soundless lips, say your breath and your blood that circulates like the light of a lighthouse.

But her eyes are the beacon that crosses your silence. Her eyes that are like the ideal geography book: the maps of pure nightmare. And your blood illuminates the shelves with books, the chairs with books, the floor full of stacked books.

But Edna's eyes only seek you. Her eyes are the most sought after book. Too late you have understood, but it does not matter. In the dream you shake her hands again, and you no longer ask for anything.

This poem tells us about Edna Lieberman, a woman with whom the author was deeply in love but whose relationship soon broke up. Despite this, she would often remember her, appearing in a large number of the author's works.

6. Godzilla in Mexico

Pay attention to this, my son: the bombs were falling on Mexico City but nobody noticed. The air carried the poison through the streets and through the open windows. You had just eaten and were watching cartoons on TV. I was reading in the next room when I found out we were going to die.

Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself to the dining room and found you on the floor.

We hug. You asked me what was going on and I didn't say that we were on the death program but that we were going to start a journey, one more, together, and don't be afraid. When leaving, death did not even close our eyes. What are we?, you asked me a week or a year later, ants, bees, wrong figures in the great rotten soup of chance? We are human beings, my son, almost birds, public and secret heroes.

This brief problem reflects quite clearly how the author works with the theme of death and the dread and fear of it (in the context of a bombing), as well as the ease with which it can get to us He also gives us a brief reflection on the issue of identity, who we are in an increasingly individualistic society but in which at the same time the person is less considered as such.

7. teach me to dance

Teach me to dance, to move my hands between the cotton of the clouds, to stretch my legs trapped by your legs, to drive a motorcycle through the sand, to pedal a bicycle under avenues of imagination, to remain still as a bronze statue, to remain immobile smoking Delicate in Our. corner.

The blue spotlights in the living room are going to show my face, mascara dripping and scratches, you're going to see a constellation of tears on my cheeks, I'm going to run.

Teach me to stick my body to your wounds, teach me to hold your heart for a little while in my hand, to open my legs as flowers open for the wind, for themselves, for the afternoon dew. Teach me to dance, tonight I want to keep up with you, open the roof doors for you, cry in your loneliness while from so high up we look at cars, trucks, highways full of police and machines ablaze.

Teach me to open my legs and put it inside me, contain my hysteria inside your eyes. Caress my hair and my fear with your lips that have pronounced so many curses, sustained so much shadow. Teach me to sleep, this is the end.

This poem is the request of someone terrified, who is afraid but wants to live free, and who asks his companion who teaches her to live freely, who frees her from her and who makes love to her in order to find the peace.

8. Sunrise

Trust me, I'm in the middle of my room waiting for it to rain. I am alone. I don't care if I finish my poem or not. I wait for the rain, drinking coffee and looking through the window at a beautiful landscape of interior patios, with clothes hanging and still, silent marble clothes in the city, where no there is a wind and in the distance you can only hear the hum of a color television, watched by a family who, at this time, are also having coffee together around a table.

Believe me: the yellow plastic tables unfold to the horizon line and beyond: towards the suburbs where apartment buildings are built, and a 16-year-old boy sitting on red bricks watches the movement of the machines.

The sky in the boy's hour is an enormous hollow screw with which the breeze plays. And the boy plays with ideas. With ideas and scenes stopped. The immobility is a transparent and hard mist that comes out of his eyes.

Believe me: it is not love that is going to come,

but beauty with her stole of dead dawns.

This poem makes a reference to the arrival of sunlight at dawn, the stillness of the awakening of ideas, although it also refers to the forecast that something bad could come after.

9. Palingenesis

I was talking to Archibald MacLeish in the bar "Los Marinos" in Barceloneta when I saw her appear, a plaster statue trudging across the cobblestones. My interlocutor also saw her and sent a waiter to look for her. For the first few minutes she didn't say a word. MacLeish ordered consommé and seafood tapas, country bread with tomato and oil, and San Miguel beer.

I settled for an infusion of chamomile and slices of whole wheat bread. I had to take care of myself, I said. Then she made up her mind to speak: the barbarians advance, she whispered melodiously, a misshapen mass, pregnant with howls and oaths, a long night blanketed to illuminate the marriage of muscles and fat.

Then his voice faded and he dedicated himself to eating the food. A hungry and beautiful woman, said MacLeish, an irresistible temptation for two poets, though of different tongues, from the same wild New World. I agreed with her without fully understanding her words and closed my eyes. When I woke up MacLeish was gone. The statue was there, in the street, its remains scattered among the uneven sidewalk and old cobblestones. The sky, blue hours before, had turned black like an insurmountable rancor.

It's going to rain, said a barefoot boy, shaking for no apparent reason. We looked at each other for a while: with his finger he indicated the pieces of plaster on the floor. Snow, he said. Don't tremble, I replied, nothing will happen, the nightmare, although close, has passed without even touching.

This poem, whose title refers to the property of regenerating or being reborn once apparently dead, shows us how the poet dreams of the advance of barbarism and intolerance, which end up destroying beauty in a time seizures

10. The hope

The clouds split. The dark opens, a pale furrow in the sky. That which comes from the bottom is the sun. The interior of the clouds, before absolute, shines like a crystallized boy. Roads covered with branches, wet leaves, footprints.

I have remained still during the storm and now reality opens up. The wind blows groups of clouds in different directions. I thank heaven for having made love with the women I have loved. From the dark, pale furrow, they come

the days as walking boys.

This poem tells of hope, of being able to resist and overcome adversity in order to see the light again.