Tino Villanueva
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Tino Villanueva is the author of six books of poetry. His Scene from the Movie GIANT won a 1994 American Book Award. /Primera causa First Cause, a bilingual chapbook of ten poems on memory and writing, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in 1999. His poems have been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, and Portuguese. His art work has appeared on the covers and pages of national and international journals, such as Green Mountains Review, Nexos, TriQuarterly, and Parnassus. He teaches in the Depatment of Romance Languages at Boston University.
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SOMETHING BEYOND LIGHT
Horizon
cleared of mist,
claiming part beauty, part dreams.
I move toward it
in search of names worth saving,
ordering stages of my life
within the grace
that keeps giving.
Unbounded, the landscape
and the simple stones
shudder in dawn's cast.
I accept this endless peace.
I am called t o by something beyond light:
Everything matters,
feels more generous, alive.
I see
as I've never seen before.
In this long shimmering present,
I write out my heart's memory,
tell stories
under the spell of my own senses.
Line by line
I break silence
with words too sudden to refuse.
(From: /Shaking Off the Dark/ (1984; second > edition, Tempe: Bilingual Press, 1998).
© 1984, 1998 by Tino Villanueva
I PICTURED A PAGE
I pictured a page--a blank white presence,
pure opposite of life,
since life bursts forth.
It brings on its rituals, come calm or storm,
and instantly: it's unerasable.
The page was real; I held it
in my two hands: white-page-utterly-white,
its utter whiteness unfathomable--
higher logic of a stuff that above all
demands the vital coloring of life
and of all that's been lived.
It was night; I just couldn't go on,
but still, I couldn't stop. Gazing and dazed,
I reached toward the immense ocean-wide
of the white. I scratched scant words
across the blank white-washed: mineral white.
Page white.
In the beginning there was a page;
and on the page, a memory,
and memory turned to words--
what gets forgotten, then comes back,
what's been mine, forever and without end,
what, when it ends, ends up being what I write.
(Original in Spanish: "Imaginé un papel" from > /Primera causa / First Cause/ (Merrick: Cross-
Cultural Communications, 1999). © 1999 by Tino > Villanueva
SO SPOKE PENELOPE
This is the palace where I've learned to survive;
where two years ago I embraced Odysseus,
stout son of Laertes one last time--
one long embrace was all it took
to shape one heartbeat between us before he left for Troy.
This is the palace I walk around in
from hall to hall, a world of stone and wood that is mine.
This is the room where I work in wool,
and talk it out with myself;
where still awake I toss and turn,
pace around in the middle of the night,
convincing myself once more
that the earthly idea of love is still the life-blood of my body.
This is palace where I wear the crown of faithfulness;
where the sound if the sea is the sound I think with.
Therefore, if I stand by a window expecting ea ch time to see
the outline of a ship coming toward me,
what is it but my love,
and the passion time gives it to grow for Odysseus,
like-minded husband of the cunning mind, for whom I wait.
So spoke Penelope when she awoke this morning;
when the golden cloth of dawn rose
out of the sea. /
(From an unpublished MS. of 31 poems titled: / So Spoke > Penelope/. "So Spoke Penelope"© 2004 by Tino Villanueva
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