“The mosaic has a fundamentally Caribbean soul,” Robert Fernandez writes in his brilliant and captivating first collection of poems, We Are Pharaoh. The son of an American mother and Colombian father, Fernandez grew up in Miami, close enough to the Caribbean to have inferred a thing or two about its soul—and maybe even to have fallen under its spell. Now a resident of the American Midwest, Fernandez remains, in large part, a poet of the tropics, one capable of detecting “whale song / in the alien corn,” as he writes in his remarkable new book-length sequence, Pink Reef. Throughout the work, Fernandez relaxedly (rather than fetishistically or heavy-handedly) invokes Caribbean fauna and flora, including dolphins, parrotfish, manta rays, the gumbo-limbo tree, and of course coral, whose accreted skeletal remains and living colonies form the complex biotic structures referred to in the book’s title.
But it’s more than topicality that makes Fernandez a poet of the tropics—truth is, his breadth of reference is actually quite wide, as the poetry below will demonstrate, and it’s pretty much devoid of locodescription. Put it this way. Just as a mosaic is made of any number of discrete tiles, so the Caribbean region comprises approximately 7000 individual islands and islets. While its collective land mass is relatively small (less than that of Oregon), the Caribbean houses an extraordinary number of microclimates and exceptional biodiversity. The human inhabitants of these islands are largely of African descent, but many have European, Near Eastern, Asian, and Southeast Asian ancestry, with a significant number of inhabitants identifying as mixed race. There are six official languages spoken throughout the region, as well as dozens of creoles, patois, and indigenous languages. In other words, what it means to have “a fundamentally Caribbean soul,” first and foremost, is to contain multitudes—to be diverse, polyvocal, complex, dynamic, and evolving.
Pink Reef is possessed of just this kind of soul. And it’s a soul that celebrates its incarnation—“there is meat enough for us all,” Fernandez writes, “for all of us lush / medallions.” Purity and restraint aren’t privileged here. Abstraction doesn’t last in this climate. As in the title poem of We Are Pharaoh, the “dominant impulse” is “to survive,” which is to say that struggle and even violence are expected. And yet it isn’t the individual that persists and is valued in this work so much as vitality itself, or life’s embodied principle. Indeed, the solitary subject often wants to reknit into an amalgam, even an interspecial society (“to be / among…brother / cacti”); the mere self wants to pluralize, or even to metamorphose: “I get so sick of myself I / want to clip & // clop, clip-i- / ty clop,” Fernandez writes, ingeniously suggesting both the dismemberment of the self and its transformation into a trotting horse.
This will to push forward through adaptation finds an analog in Pink Reef’s powerful musicality and shifting forms, which manifest a protean erotics of excitation and play while still offering moments of startling and resonant denotative clarity. The wish for a consistent through-line or conventional argumentation should be resisted in favor of a more open, sensuous reading strategy at first, followed ideally, and inevitably, by a pleasure-driven investigation of the sequence’s pockets and patterns of meaning-making. Reading Fernandez, think of yourself as a kind of valiant scuba diver, dazzled as you take in the heterogenous structure of a coral reef at the onset, then rapt as you poke among its many marvel-holding nooks and niches, not knowing if they hold a gold doubloon or a moray eel. It’s a thrilling experience you won’t soon forget.
—Timothy Donnelly
Editor's Note: The following 23 sections of Pink Reef represent only a portion of the book, which has just been published by Canarium Books. The first section here (“I’ve decided to pay…”) first appeared in Mandorla: Nueva Escritura de las Américas.
from Pink Reef
*
I’ve decided to pay
just at the point
I’ve decided
to pay into
the linen wall
& hope the fountain
will take my money
just at the point
at which I’ve decided to pay,
the point at which
the slit begins to leak
(it must be
a gusher)
just at the point
at which
the pigeons circle
around the single
violet pigeon
as if slowly
tending a star
just at the
point I want to stop:
the wall is amber
just at the point
I see the vultures
in the distance
& am given back
just as liars
bleed from
the eyes
just as
at any moment
I like to play
at being desperate
as at any moment
being desperate
likes to play
at being
brained
so the brain corals
heave
through the arms,
budding
across the skin
(torso by
Cimabue)
just so I ask
for the peace
to be &
simply is
& ask for
the peace to be
among my stung
with buds
brother
cacti
*
was the black wallet
was the moral
was the quilled
meat of the wallet
was the vernal
floes of light
was the murder at
the site of production
red heart steaming
bleeding in the hands
red heart of
silk organza streaming
bleating thread
red heart of
polished metal
streaming, unspooling wet
sheets of metal…
Jeff Koons
places a hand
on my lung
I say
I know
I am not
adequate
my stomach
would bleed
into a gallop
Jeff Koons
wants to fuck me
I offer him
a strip of
my back,
a strip
of my bloodied
bleeding
*
sensitive anti-discourse dolphin
with your graceful pink
penis sensitive
expressivist teller of tales
with your pregnant precarious
dolphins
master of manners radical
chic with your rabid
drifting joui-
ssant dolphins
sensitive visionary master
of manners sensitive
softly so real so
funny really I
get so sick of myself I
want to clip &
clop, clip-i-
ty clop
*
never again second-guessing my
“I am loves”
& the horses walk off,
sweat hardening
what is it to ruminate,
to boil over? The blood
like a net,
we dredge up
(Catullus) radishes
& mullets
*
why don’t I hope that I hate my-
self, says Judith, cutting a Madonna
nook out around her sternum
why don’t I blast blood
from between my teeth, says
Judith, rubbing her naked feet together
why don’t I just die, says Judith,
drawing a dozen roses ta-
da from beneath her ribs
*
red blood that runs
through the mahi’s veins
the blood an aureus
on which Agrippina’s nose is up-
curled
your
body on the cleaning board
cut then grip the gills’
shag,
tear loose
there is meat enough for us all for all of us lush
medallions
*
it is the refulgent blush of your experience
that tends fires with Visigoths and swans
it is the blush that makes you ornery
(you make me
work harder for my lilies,
you make me reflect on my scent of meat)
it is the refulgent blush of your
diadems that makes me itch through the scrim-
shawed ant-hill of my bones
it is your blush that makes me
ornery, that blushes with the cheetah foam
of my refulgent disasters
*
the artist
has blood in the stomach
the artist has
blood &
bubbles of blood
in the stomach
the artist has
organs announcing themselves
as organs
I cannot argue with the flesh
I cannot argue with the meat
across which I speak
across which I grapple
& beat
*
draw the jaw back
shake the eyes
back into the head
tear back the meat
joining the jaw
to the cheek
an egg emerges
in the cheek
observe the egg
in the pocket
*
bent over,
spitting
avocado seeds
we should be happy
releasing seeds,
glass screens
lifting from the seeds
(the pearl and wrapped
Pegasus of the face un-
wraps its wings)
releasing seeds
to not be sick
we should be happy,
voiding them
*
a pot of soil
mixed with
charcoal and egg-
shell:
in the first instance,
the orchid is a mask
*
leave the weed
untended,
it becomes a tree,
becomes a trunk
(a gray &
black flower
blossoms
from its crown)
leave the weed
untended,
it reveals
a face (O
man walking
beneath the leaves
O eyes shaded
beneath a broad-
brimmed hat
O lean
silhouette)
then a shock of rain,
an ecstasy of sudden passage
*
eyes burn from the acidity
farther off
cock splits into plump
lilies
jasper is mixed with the milk,
raccoon is mixed with the water
harbinger of little
blood discs
I am going
coming
seeing
laughing
I run my hand
over the red backs
of dolphins,
over baked
lilies
the lilies are tan
& plump this afternoon
*
spins
an ethics
of banana-leaf
packets in which
moist cakes
cook
spins
the linga
& tulip together
spins
trans-
national
pools of
soft orange suns
flexing over pebbles
or spins the searchlights
that drift screaming (all my
Marilyns are trapped in the light,
all my Marilyns…)
*
soup is
all the good stuff
mixed in,
soon enough,
the froth,
tomato-
white, mixed
with cubes
of eggplant,
some
“nail your
hand
to the
refrigerator”
brittle,
some “one
who betrays…”
I must power down
these lights,
flush the light-discs
from my chest
*
in the streets,
the macaws, actually, they are
everything working against us
& have been for months
what, besides, shall we make
of slews
slews of
crowd crystals
I get tired
I get exasperatingly lost
I think, here I had it in my hands
now, all my souls broken into
qualities
I need
a rest;
the vultures
along the wall:
tethered with gold thread
I am leaving the world
I am entering the
sotto valley
*
always skylight cubes, melting
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon cubes
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
blocks of melting shine,
gushing arcades
of blond and red reef…
water flows over me,
light flows out of me
*
so soon
into chattering and lounge
quite soon
too soon
rye light
rye eye seeing as it’s flowing
flown ground eating
across seeing
find the dragon’s scales seeing in
my stomach’s bleeding
*
believe everyone you meet, wipe
the blood up from the street
eat acid in the heat, expel
warm white tracers
split the grain of the light,
we
get fucked up every night
watch the Glory mites
eating away at our
seeing
*
angels of “how exactly am I feeling?”
ask yourself
ask yourself
“how exactly am I feeling?”
I cannot stop I love hell
I am light
new moon again but I am light
Cartier chariots strung with pearls
expelling billowy brown light
I cannot stop
fucking
loving
