The 10 best poems by Roberto Bolaño

These are the most outstanding poems of this cultural reference of the 20th century.

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 his novels such as "Estrella distante" and "Los detectives salvajes". He is also known for being one of the main founders of the infrarrealist movement, which sought the free expression of one's own vital position independently of the conventions and limits imposed by society.

The path of this author, although he may have received greater recognition for his novels, began with his lyrical works, mainly poems in which the author expressed his emotions and thoughts on a wide range of topics. And in order to be able to observe and deepen in his way of seeing things, in this article we present a brief selection of Roberto Bolaño's poems. 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 of subjects as diverse as love, poetry or death, from a sometimes tragic point of view.

1. The Romantic Dogs

At that time I was twenty years old and crazy. I had lost a country but I had gained a dream. And if I had that dream, nothing else mattered. Neither working nor praying, nor studying at dawn with the romantic dogs. And the dream lived in the emptiness of my spirit.

A wooden room, in semi-darkness, in one of the lungs of the tropics. And sometimes I turned inside myself and visited the dream: 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 up. You will leave behind the images of pain and the labyrinth and you will forget. But at that time growing up would have been a crime. I am here, I said, with the romantic dogs and here I will stay.

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

2. Muse

She was more beautiful than the sun and I was not yet sixteen years old. Twenty-four have passed and she is still by my side. Sometimes I see her walking over the mountains: she 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, Muse, protect me, I tell her, in the terrible days of unceasing adventure. Never be parted from me. Guard my steps and the steps of my son Lautaro. Let me feel your fingertips again on my back, nudging me, when all is dark, when all is lost.Let me hear again the whistle.

I am your faithful lover even though sometimes sleep separates me from you. You too are the queen of dreams. My friendship you have every day and someday your friendship will gather me from the wasteland of oblivion. For though you come when I go, deep down we are inseparable friends.

Muse, 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 in scratches.

In unhealthy relationships and in cruelty, you were always with me. And even if the years go by and the Roberto Bolaño of the Alameda and the Librería de Cristal transforms, becomes paralyzed, 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 wake through the long night. No matter the years or the sickness. No matter the pain or the effort I must make to follow you. Because with you I can cross the great desolate spaces and I will always find the door that returns me to the Chimera, because you are with me, Muse, more beautiful than the sun and more beautiful than the stars.

The author tells us in this poem about his poetic inspiration, his muse, seeing her in different environments and contexts.

3. Rain

It rains and you say it is as if the clouds were crying. Then you cover your mouth and hurry your step. As if those scrawny clouds were crying? Impossible. But then, where does this rage come from, this despair that must drive us all to the devil?

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

Or else you will forget it. Neither the rain, nor the crying, nor your footsteps echoing on the cliff path matter; now you can cry and let your image fade on the windshields of the cars parked along the promenade. But you can't get lost.

This poetry reflects a sense of strangeness, sadness, fear and helplessness derived from watching the rain, which also symbolizes pain and tears. This is an element of frequent appearance in the author's work, which is also often used as a point of union between the real and the unreal.

4. Strange mannequin

Strange mannequin of a subway store, what a way to observe me and sense me beyond any bridge, looking at the ocean or a huge lake, as if he expected adventure and love, and can a girl's scream in the middle of the night convince me of the usefulness of my face or the moments are veiled, red-hot copper plates, the memory of love denying itself three times for the sake of another kind of love. And so we harden without leaving the aviary, devaluing ourselves, or we return to a tiny house where a woman waits for us sitting in the kitchen.

Strange mannequin of a Metro store, what a way to communicate with me, single and violent, and to sense me beyond everything. You only offer me buttocks and breasts, platinum stars and sparkling sexes. Don't make me cry on the orange train, nor on the escalators, nor when you imagine, if you imagine, my steps as an absolute veteran again dancing through the gorges.

Strange mannequin of a Metro store, as the sun and the shadows of the skyscrapers tilt, you will tilt your hands; as the colors and the 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 dialogues with a mannequin in a subway store, speaks to us of a sense of emptiness and loneliness, of the search for sexual pleasure as a means of escape and of the progressive fading of illusion.

The great Roberto Bolaño, in his office.

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 they shine again for you Edna's eyes behind the ring of fire that was once the dirt road, the path you traveled at night, back and forth, again and again, looking for her or perhaps looking for your shadow.

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

But his eyes are the lighthouse that pierces your silence. Your eyes that are like the ideal geography book: the maps of pure nightmare. And your blood illuminates the bookshelves with books, the chairs with books, the floor full of stacked books.

But Edna's eyes are only looking for you. Your eyes are the most wanted book. Too late you have understood it, but it doesn't matter. In the dream you shake her hands again, and 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, he would remember her often, appearing in a large number of the author's works.

6. Godzilla in Mexico

Get this, my son: bombs were falling on Mexico City but no one noticed. The air carried the poison through the streets and open windows. You had just finished eating and were watching cartoons on TV. I was reading in the next room when I knew we were going to die.

Despite the dizziness and nausea I crawled into the dining room and found you on the floor.

We hugged. You asked me what was going on and I didn't say that we were on death's program but that we were going to start a journey, one more, together, and not to be afraid. As you left, death did not even close our eyes. What are we, you asked me a week or a year later, ants, bees, wrong numbers 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 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 come to us. It also makes us a brief reflection on the theme 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 through the cotton of the clouds, to stretch my legs trapped by your legs, to ride a motorcycle on the sand, to pedal a bicycle under avenues of imagination, to stand still as a bronze statue, to stand still smoking Delicates in our corner.

The blue spotlights in the hall will show my face, dripping with mascara and scratches, you will see a constellation of tears on my cheeks, I will run away.

Teach me to stick my body to your wounds, teach me to hold your heart a little while in my hand, to open my legs like flowers open for the wind for themselves, for the evening dew. Teach me to dance, tonight I want to follow your beat, to open the doors of the roof, to cry in your loneliness while from so high up we watch cars, trucks, highways full of police and burning machines.

Teach me to open my legs and put it in me, contain my hysteria inside your eyes. Caress my hair and my fear with your lips that have uttered so much curse, held 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 her companion to teach her to live freely, to set her free and make love to her in order to find peace.

8. Sunrise

Believe me, I am in the middle of my room waiting for rain. I am alone. I don't care whether I finish my poem or not. I wait for the rain, drinking coffee and looking out the window at a beautiful landscape of inner courtyards, with hanging and still clothes, silent marble clothes in the city, where there is no wind and in the distance only the hum of a color television can be heard, watched by a family who also, at this hour, drinks coffee gathered around a table.

Believe me: the yellow plastic tables unfold to the horizon line and beyond: to the suburbs where they build apartment buildings, and a boy of 16 sitting on red bricks contemplates the movement of the machines.

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

Believe me: it's not love that's coming,

but beauty with its stole of dead albs.

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

9. Palingenesia

I was chatting with Archibald MacLeish in the bar "Los Marinos" in Barceloneta when I saw her appear, a plaster statue walking painfully on the cobblestones. My interlocutor also saw her and sent a waiter to look for her. For the first few minutes she did not say a word. MacLeish ordered consommé and tapas de Mariscos, pan de payés with tomato and oil, and San Miguel beer.

I settled for a camomile tea and slices of whole wheat bread. I had to take care of myself, I said. Then she decided to speak: the barbarians are advancing, she whispered melodiously, a shapeless mass, pregnant with howls and oaths, a long night buttered to illuminate the marriage of muscle and fat.

Then her voice died away and she devoted herself to ingesting the viands. A hungry and beautiful woman, said MacLeish, an irresistible temptation to two poets, albeit of different tongues, from the same untamed New World. I agreed with him without fully understanding his words and closed my eyes. When I awoke MacLeish was gone. The statue lay there in the street, its remains scattered among the uneven sidewalk and the old cobblestones. The sky, hours before blue, had turned black like an insurmountable grudge.

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

This poem, whose title refers to the property of regeneration or rebirth once apparently dead, shows us how the poet dreams of the advance of barbarism and intolerance, which end up destroying beauty in convulsive times.

10. Hope

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

I have stood still during the storm and now reality opens up. The wind carries groups of clouds in different directions. I thank the sky for having made love to the women I have loved. From the dark, pale furrow, come the days like walking boys.

the days like walking boys.

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