Time Without Keys
The poems in “Time Without Keys,” by the Uruguayan poet Ida Vitale, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Pollack, span a writing career of over 75 years. Vitale’s affinity for that which is transient gives the book a buoyant edge: “Can vegetating be so bad? Must you take root, with the permanence that implies?” This is a poet drawn toward things that take flight, like birds and words: “Where is the seed to attract words? / The glue to trap them, without harming them?” In “Photo with Little Paper Bird” she places the dense materiality of flesh—her extended hand—against the airy lightness of an origami bird:
And then it landed in my hand
that labored not for such conceits,
for the extravagant and fleet
photo taken by Daniel,
a great surprise for me as well
as instantaneously emerged
such a rare little bird,
[…]
Miraculous origami,
paper feather-light, insomnious,
jagged cutout, osteoporous,
this boneless thing that dances
Vitale relishes the movement of relinquishing something, treating the act of such surrender not like a loss, but like a gain in weightlessness: “We left a happy angel from our memory swirling / in the fecund cascade. . . ” In “Night, This Dwelling,” a “cloak of oblivion” gives way to “letter to kiss to caress / to an open rose to blind flight to weeping,” and later on:
I am no longer the poor one,
measured in mortal, melancholic air,
body blinded by light or a simple tear.
What this sea, this swollen shadow
loses little by little
comes to be saved within me,
forever cloud,
blue horse
eternal sky.
In a short essay at the end of the book, Vitale describes the “moment when a verse arises” as “that first mysterious coagulation,” and insists that the pleasure of close reading can release a work’s “mysterious energy.” Her poems carry this spirit of secrecy—as if someone were speaking from the other side of a barrier, and as if the poem could get you there: “WHERE AT LAST IT IS REVEALED / WHO I WAS, WHO I AM […] WHO YOU ARE, WHO YOU WERE.”