The Infinite Loop

In her third book, the first to be translated into English, Oneyda González evokes roads and searches, birds and light, blood and mothers. The first-person speaker is on a journey of discovery, one rendered in indistinct generalities:

From your universe to mine
a universe settles and decomposes
in the infinite howl.
How not to succumb to it?
What a multitude of stars!
What an array of directions!
What an eternity of fears!

Though the specifics of the universe and the journey’s destination remain unclear, the poet approaches her quest with gusto, in dialogue with a notional interlocutor who receives her endless questions: “What does tedium know / of tedium itself?”; “Should we keep silent? / Should we walk? / Should we not walk?”; “What am I talking about?”

González pulls her epigraphs from Hermann Hesse, Stéphane Mallarmé, and T.S. Eliot (“The wonder that I feel is easy / Yet ease is cause of wonder”), bringing the latter to life with startling irreverence, as in “I see T.S. Eliot / sailing, / I see him giving me a signal,” or “Who told T.S. Eliot / that I spin around in my bedroom.”

In a book where time and being are constantly thrown into question—“Do I belong? / To what?”—the closest moment to an answer comes in the beautifully shaped final poem, “Parable of the Infinite Loop or Möbius Strip”:

The full instant                                                                                      But then
      of silent noise                                                                   the Other came
         when the man,                            to give him his share of shame.
                        untouched,         Again and again those noises return,
                                                came
                                          from the vine to his hovel,
                                 and they pass                        and he laid down
                           and return                                                          naked
                     and they pass                                                            to rest.