If Today Were Tomorrow

The Kʼicheʼ Mayan poet Humberto Ak’abal was born in the western highlands of Guatemala, a place his translator, Michael Bazzett, describes as holding “mountains covered in cloud forest.” This strangely enticing and obscured view of the mountains is echoed in If Today Were Tomorrow, in which the visible is often difficult to grasp. In “Sheep,” the animals, “wooly and fat / wade through the sky, / which is why / we never see their legs.” The reader knows that the sheep’s legs are concealed by the clouds, but that is irrelevant here. Ak’abal hints at a landscape more vivid and palpable than what the eye can behold, one that is located deep in the folds of a thought, as in “They Know,” which describes a night “lit / with thought,” as the speaker declares: “I live here / but my mind / is there.”

Something like anguish lurks in the mind of the speaker of “Rupture,” intimating, again, a distortion of the visible world: 

Your silence
exploded and awakened
the madman sleeping in my brain.

[…]

They tell me you turned into flowers,
they tell me you turned into honey.

Bazzett compares Ak’abal’s poetics to Popol Vuh’s cosmogony, in which words are not “imposed” on the landscape, but “uncovered through careful listening and observation of the world around us.” Something concealed (in the landscape) is brought to the surface in Ak’abal’s poems, but the uncovering is not restricted to names—not even elements and animals are constant, another iteration of their being is always there, in waiting. In one poem, “a humpbacked tree / is a strange animal”; in another, bats that come out of charred logs turn into “smudged ash” or “smoke”; and, in “Water and Fire,” “boiling water / looked like a rabid animal / scratching inside the poet.”