THE EPHEMERAL CONSOLATION OF AN IMAGE

My name is Francisco J. Lauriño. Me and Teresa Martin are going to show some of our photographs and verses together (my photographs and her English verses on my Spanish verses). This is our most important interest to be here.

We hope you enjoy.

INTRODUCTION

Huge little streams our dreams tread on.

Hemos agotado el cauce de los besos y los sueños han barrido la playa de nuestra fe. 

Exhausted we have of kisses their stream and dreams swept have of our faith the beach.
Of my dream I have been born, out of water and pouring myself into a stream of sea, cloud and rock, flowers of a harsh world nobody wants to dream of. Drops of conscience into my lenses that make my pupils be taught by a digital mirror and dream of being awake and pressing the button of reality, not mine, the reality of others and their nightmares. I keep my eye stuck to the glass of nature, a drop of rain out of the womb of a sky cloud falling on a flower or ten thousand ancient stones. And on the stones my camera senses the stroke of men combing ten thousand tiles and hundreds of blades of grass plaited around feeding gardens and nourishing sands. My fingerprints do not remain still into the river or the wave that brokes into my shoes, nor on the bark of the oak grown by a bygone monk and on the cave walls just the unaccountable traces of a hand millions of years old. And then my neck turned to the snow and the wind over a rainbow horse. Traces were no longer essential. Just pictures from my eyes.

 

 

Image 001

Estoy aquí. Sobre mí
se agigantan las luces
produciendo en su compás
haces de sombras que se agrupan.

Here I am. Over me
bigger and bigger the lights become
in their beat creating
beams of shadows gathered they have.

In a quiet summer afternoon the crystal inside, my eyes in and out of my body, decided to look for a mirror and there it was. Where a stream of life sprang. There my eye remained when I turned to check the machine of light: into the water, made of wood and liquid element. But the arms of my world -or is it the world of others?- began to bloom to set my head, there, yes there, over colour, light and shadows, shape and texture. And my pupils have flown, into the picture, and there, there they were, two figures in a the shade, of a summer afternoon, from the lenses into nature. Superb figures in full apathy towards the self-centered creatures that danced around trying to embrace nature, but with flesh arms. And the arms of nature with their ducked-pupils were there and into the watered crystal of my lenses they came. There it was, the long-armed eyes, of nature. My eyes have turned wooden-ducked eyes.

Image 003

Pero morir, a veces,
es mantener la saliva hirviente en el silencio
mientras se consume la piel en los grandes
lagos lunares del sueño

But die, sometimes,
is to keep the boiling saliva into silence
while worn out the skin is in the huge
moon lakes of dream.

The eyes turned paintbrush. But I am not holder of a paint-soaking palette, just a dreamer of paintings others gave birth to. Ah, but the lenses have grabbed my mind and direct my eye that does not want to commit suicide into the distorted mirror of nature. Is it really distorted? Perfectly distorted identity. Impressionism into the eye. My own: as everyone owns his one.

Image 002

Las cuencas de tus días,
tus pálidas mejillas
y tu collar fino y brillante
parpadearon un momento
y dejaron desangrarse la flor de tus misterios.

Of your days the hollows,
your white-pale cheeks
and your fine bright necklace
for a moment blinked
and of your mysteries they let the flower bleed.

Of leprechauns I did not know, nor a pot of gold I looked for. A child I was when over the rainbow a sound, a light coming from the north I looked for. And it was next door. Light, brightness over my roof, my head, into the clouds to become, riding over forests and wisps of dancing grass opening a path for my camera. Into the whiteness of a back yard giving birth to a palette of colours for my picture, the sought for rainbow. And to the north no trip was ridden over my next door house, just there it was. The flower of the mystery of my past bled into the photograph.

Image 004

La noche, acolchada tarea de algún gato fantástico,
incendio de nubes,
concatenación de soliloquios,
alumbra farolas desechadas, soles mustios
que hiciera morir
la sola orden de nuestra Perséfone -querida
negrura,
ante la palidez argentina
de Selene, la bienamada-.

Night, quilted task of a certain whimsical cat,
cloud fire,
chain of monologues,
lights rejected street lamps, withered suns
turned to die
by the only order of our Persefone -dear
darkness,
facing the silvery wanness
of Selene, the beloved-.

And night arrives to the whimsical beam of another photograph, the last one, just today. And I want to grab darkness in my eye not to say farewell to light. As a black cat, the one in my wishes, night menaces my eye like paws in search of a slippery seagull. And I understand I am not cat but bird fishing the last sun rays on a little fish-like wave. Solitary soliloquies into the sadness of an enchanting sunset: nobody seeking a portrait just me, a seagull of photograth. Meanwhile the night arrives. Whimsical dream of a shotter of light in search of the likeness of the dark.

Image 005

Los gatos verdes y sus colas
Desparramadas en el silencio.

Green cats and their tails
scattered into the silence.

Out of the mist, the leaning sun led me to a party of green extremities. Cats there in the middle of the countryside miaowing to Selene to come or thousands of corn-inventing arms? All that greenery for my eye, rebel models for my hand that wished to reconcile those tails, those arms with their legs, their soulders, the angered mountains, grey envious dismembered parts. In between, the sympathetic body of mist.

Image 006

Guillaume Apollinaire ha muerto
Y nosotros aquí, siendo, como en el espacio.

Guillaume Apollinaire has died
And here we, being, like in space.

And the lens turned pen in search of the old poet. Not far from the uninspiring road -but for Kerouac-, rock guided the leather of my shoes, no, of my camera bag. Into the stream, and back to consciousness. Life posing. My eye stuck to the glass, for a while, another, then more. Minutes of still contemplation, fast throb of my finger. Then mist again, and fingers of the day dressing the invisible skyline.

Image 007

A ella la encontraréis en una sonata,
o en un vals, o en un concierto
de estrellas fugaces.

She will be met in a sonata,
or in a waltz, or in a concert
of shooting stars.

Yes. There, by the sea. She will be there. Yes, she will be waiting for a shooting star dropping into the shallow pools on the beach, into the paths carved into the sheet that warms her feet. She will wish she would sink into the line of the sky, and maybe there she will find another beach, maybe the same beach tred on only by her dreams.

Image 008

A ella la reconoceréis por sus locuras
y ficciones y somnambulismos extraños.
Ella era una leyenda
que nunca se quiso forjar.

She will be recognized by her follies
and inventions and weird somnambulism.
She was a legend
that was never meant to be shaped.

But she did not have to invent the beach, because it was there. And there she was able to turn her follies into branches of the trees in her sleepless nights. Twisted. Like the streams the waves carved in the sand. Like the caves she had torn off the cliffs, herself, without help, while being rain, while feeling sea. Then the photographer came to picture the sea while being emptied of tears.

Image 009

TE RECOBRABA DE PRONTO
en un mar de dudas inquebrantables
y de obeliscos profundos de almas yertas en la idea.

I WOULD WIN YOU BACK SUDDENLY
in a sea of unyielding doubts
and deep obelisks of souls unswerving in the idea.

Air-shaped, misty skirt of yellow and purple, like cat eyes while gazing a wisp of grass after being stepped by a fly, there she was, the idea of an unexisting past, an unbending future, the present to arrive, flower of my insanity, my dearest literary life. Lines that knock on the door of twisted reality -unbreakable desire to be carved into the pictures of one's mind-; verses piercing others' rectangular boxes in which they are confined. And meanwhile, the flower of unpoured thoughts, suddenly blooming in a wine cup or simply in a velveted bud.