Fiesta Theory

The fiesta is like the universe— 

there is nothing else like it.

It isn’t tripartite like Dante’s

Comedy. It isn’t possible

to distinguish a paradise 

in its interior, and less so to distinguish

between the chosen and the damned.

Plato says the cosmos is a great animal.

Extraterritorial, that’s what the fiesta is like.

It keeps an unfathomable relationship with power,

that’s why some think of beauty in forms of government

while they join in the elasticity of numbers.

Bodies recuperate a sovereignty

before the names on the register

and some improvise new taxonomies

to individualize them

once the series of natural numbers has been revealed as useless,

or the reiteration of the calendar of saints’ days above the perfect heads.

How difficult it is to need to specify what 

prophecy there is

in the fiesta.

Hubbub of the kind around no center.

One of my students defines it

unsurpassably 

                        as an exhibition

of volumes.

Translated by Curtis Bauer
“Fiesta Theory” was published in Eros Is More (Alice James Books, 2014).

You can read and listen the poem in the original Spanish here.