1

Hanging in suspense on the page, it lends its pair of eyes to open the night; and with surprising zigzags it leaves the reader in suspense, the gaze assisting a verb that floats above the final period, which becomes the starting point, thus extracting a rare meaning from the routine punctuation, where

it buzzes,

it flickers,

it buzzes,

it flickers

the zumbete, as we called the hummingbird in my homeland.

Do I see it? Do I feel it? Do I imagine it? Is the beak the sharp point of the pencil, the razor-sharp nib of the fountain pen, the stuttering typing of the Smith Corona? Is the night a rectangular cocoon? Is the body a jumble of rocks, earth, rhizomes, roots, ants, and worms? Is the arm the stem? Is the hand the calyx? Are the fingers the sepals? Are the brief pages that curve more and more as I peer into the depths of the words numbered petals?

Right now, the American apodiform is on page 29, brightly colored with a long beak and extendable tubular tongue, flying around the four margins and three stanzas, buzzing between verses, flickering in the tiny shadows that appear and disappear between letters. It is also on pages 28 and 27, and on pages 30 and 31; and yet it has not left the term hummingbird, a map of three syllables and three hundred and sixty restless horizons, nor the sparse punctuation that in page 29 vainly attempts to contain it:

nothing in the first stanza

two dots at the end of the second:

a period in the third.

I continue on page 29, where it has momentarily stopped at the beginning of that third and final stanza; visible is the sustained stain that names it, invisible the fluttering that blends with the air more than fifty times per second:

hummingbird

of ink

wings

in the air.

Miniscule, and in lowercase, it seems summarized in the final period, perhaps hinting that it will always be there, here, at that or this point:

.

which summarizes the colon from the previous stanza:

:

which in turn summarize two lips, two eyes, and two wings from the first, second, and third stanzas, respectively.

Irony: as the steps of reading exhaust the written sequence, the sequence described by the three images that draw a single one ascends.

Transformed into cardinal eyes (numbers, cardinal points) and in flight, the cardinal lips anticipate the ink hummingbird and the wings in the air. Only one letter has changed: cardinals instead of cardinals, and another has been deleted: eyes instead of red (= cardinals), so that all those plurals, like halves, are added to the singular buzz that immediately emerges (wings in the air), diluting themselves in their own ink and erasing themselves in the word that the poet has just written and the reader has just read.

2

Between Coatlicue’s breasts, hummingbird feathers.

And from the virgin goddess is born Huitzilopochtli, ‘left-handed hummingbird’ or ‘hummingbird of the south’, who wears sandals made of hummingbird feathers.

The buzzing rainbow—messenger of the gods and protector of warriors—reveals to us the miracle of analogy. It reminds us of the angel of the Annunciation.

Only if we renounce the bridge of differences will the distance between Coatlicue and Mary be seen as insurmountable. Huitzilopochtli is born of the Aztec virgin, and Jesus Christ is born of the Christian virgin. Both are inscribed in the code of sacrifice, both born of miracle: the god of war will demand human sacrifices; the god of the other cheek will sacrifice himself for humanity.

The ink hummingbird forces us to build and cross bridges, not only in the realm of poetry but also in that of myths and beliefs. Tradition, it tells us, goes back to a remote, oral origin. Hence its rhyme with the flowery hummingbird of Nahuatl poetry. The image, which has roots between pages and flowers, also has them between the breasts of a goddess.

3

The title of the first poem in Federico de la Vega’s Noche cerrada  looks like the eye of an old keyhole turned upside down:

¡

We are invited to open the darkness buried between the forty-three pages with a keyhole that is a punctuation mark.

An exclamation mark.

The opening of the sign immediately leads to the first word of the book.

Through the keyhole, the gaze focuses on that first word that occupies the entire verse and turns out to be nothing less than the word Being. Thus, in capital letters. Succinct being, almost nothing, almost zero, but in capital letters:

Being

Being what?

Being

one

and two

and train

smoke

of two

one of whom

two

of one

departed

by train.

The count that begins with the second verse, one, leads us to turn the first verse around, Being maliciously converted into zero, absence, to imagine the sequence of natural numbers, of whole numbers, in successive order.

A surprising zigzag of the ink hummingbird, however, alerts us to the contrary. There will be, yes, absence, there will be zero, which as such, that is, as absence, can form part of the sequence of natural numbers, just as musical silence can appear on a musical stave, that presence of an absence.

But there will also be a two/ of one/ split/ on a train. And a one/ split and so divided warns that this is not a sequence of natural numbers, but rather the nature of the relationship between two/ of one, that is, a pair that has ceased to be a unit.

The one becomes smoke when the pair dissolves, two/ of one that ends on a train, not in three, because the poem tells of a farewell.

¡ is the cartography of an absence.

The map of this nothingness is drawn with simplicity. And with a touch of humor and a lot of modesty, which, to the minimalist keyhole, gives a perspective that is anything but Renaissance, startling the reader, an untimely witness to a moment that belongs only to the two split into ones and the one split into two, and above all to smoke, the evanescent, the fleeting, that which is about to disappear.

One, two, and train: the sudden change of a letter, s changed to n, throws the sequence off balance, derails the count, unleashing the restrained meaning of numbers that propel themselves like verbs to separate, to move away.

The count is a farewell. Numbers are metaphors for words that are verbs that are facts. To have, here, is to have lived.

We realize this precisely when we fall out of the count, because when we board that t,r,e,n bound for nowhere, we will have already dismissed our initial suspicions:

Is this a typo? Is this t,r,e,n intended to untie the tongue by biting it? Are we dealing with a ghostly version of the childhood tongue twister, the one that has always seemed so Cuban to me because of its accent on azúcar (sugar): Erre con erre cigarro / erre con erre barril / Rápido corren los carros / cargados de azúcar del ferrocarril.

Trabacuentas, not trabalenguas, from numbers to words and back again, and from words as metaphors for numbers and back again, we go from three to train, and once we have boarded the apparent nonsense, consciously or unconsciously we return to the written word in its origin, when little by little writing and communication emerged from accounting and commerce, the number as quantity becoming a metaphor for the thing being counted: accounts, debts recorded with wedges, glyphs, signs.

Faced with the precipice of emotion, the poet, subject to words, attempts to subdue the word; laconic, he slows it down, cools it by numbering it, although in the end the numbers burn and everything culminates, like fire, in smoke.

Poetry of what moves away, of what leaves, of what empties.

Modest poetry of a concealment that paradoxically places us before a keyhole.

A hummingbird zigzags and then alights where two bodies move/ vertically… joined/ at their center:// the heart.

I underline one word: vertical. The movement of the couple is now towards two in one, not the zero of that other movement, the horizontal one, the departure of R with R and train.

We are in Euler’s theorem.

A strange title for a love poem, if we forget the almost instinctive modesty with which all emotions are expressed in Noche cerrada, whether they be passion, sadness, or mourning.

To facilitate understanding, and in case my fellow man, my brother, the hypocritical reader, has befriended Dr. Alzheimer, I will remind him of the basics of that theorem:

If [a] ∈ Um then [a]φ(m) = [1] in Zm.

Therefore, if a b ∈ Z verifies that mcd(m,b)=1 then bφ(m) ≡ 1 (mod m)

4

A vibrant mine of precious metals, a living fountain pen that sips nectar and serves ink; a fragile inkwell that, one by one, drops letters onto the page, the ink hummingbird is an origami in reverse, a paper bow tie whose smoothness evokes volume.

Sheets of this Moebius strip: from voice (silence: lips, silence) to writing, from writing to buzzing and singing (bird), and from buzzing to ink.

Paradoxes of printed origami: extinct in ink, images dissolve and return, vanishing as they are fixed.

The role of paper has never been to remain blank. The Chinese knew this, as they were the first to pleat it, giving it shapes and therefore shadows, and they invented ink, that other gunpowder, to stain it. The Byzantine Philo also knew this, whose inkwell, from which ink never spills, promises chance and wonder like an eight-sided die.

The meridians crowd together in the captivating image. In it, the East gives us the immense night that dries like light in vertical strokes; and the West celebrates the dark night of philosophy, evoking it with the mechanical octopus that never loses its horizontality as it slips from seductive oral dialogue to solitary written cogitation.

Except for Mallarmé’s blank page, since the invention of ink and the inkwell, nothing like this buzzing has ever suggested to me with such enchantment the idea of writing as a material that is always available and never spilled.

Poetry as impulse and restraint.

Rhyme of adventure and order.

I return to a sonnet by Darío that I always forget by heart. A sonnet that sounds and echoes with the drops falling on the blank page. A sonnet whose ink is blood and whose inkwell is a heart. Ink, ink in blood, which turns out to be, in the splendid oblique image of the Nicaraguan (splendid: spleen), the blackest bile of the melancholic: the spiritual blood of those who wear the iron shirt with a thousand bloody points over their souls.

Drops of melancholy fall on the page and drops of ink fall from the fluttering of the hummingbird. The flight is suspended, the reader is suspended, whose gaze follows like a shadow skimming the inkwell of feathers. The poem as flight and fall. Flight that falls. Fall that flies. With its zigzags, the gleaming apodiform of inkwell and pen (with the accent on stilus) warns of two dangers: not having style or being trapped in the loneliness of style.

In the iridescence of the little bird that is almost nothing, that captivates us by being more nothing than a rainbow, tradition lives on: Darío’s swan and González Martínez’s owl, which twists its neck; Huidobro’s goshawk and the raven that Vallejo lifts up in an intense written pyramid so that it may fertilize the crow; the quetzal or hummingbird feather tiara that the vicereine of Mexico gives to Sor Juana, even the bat evoked with horror by the Tenth Muse in her pyramidal poem when she refers to the three Furies as featherless birds winged bybrown membranes.

5

It is said that, in Warburg Castle, Martin Luther threw his inkwell at the devil. He did not do so like an octopus, to hide, but like a pulpit, to scare him away, because the devil was bothering him, preventing him from writing. Faced with a blank page, this is absolutely useless. No strategy works: the Δαίμων lurks on the paper and is also in the ink that will cover it and in the inkwell eager to get to work. That is why Federico de la Vega raises his pen over nothingness, where the devil will appear letter by letter. His own devil.

6

Coda or tail?

Unfortunately, Maximiliano and Federico never met in Santiago de Querétaro, where the emperor was shot in 1867, and a little over a century later, in 1981, the poet was born.

However, regardless of the dates used to divide time, there is a bridge between them, a great bridge that cannot be seen, as Lezama said. A huge bridge a couple of inches wide.

The exact place and date of the encounter between Maximilian and the hummingbird is known: it was in San Salvador, Brazil, on the morning of January 11, 1860. The pages in which the emperor recounts the details of that encounter are also known. Prose of hummingbird ink. Prose dazzled by the bird’s flashing beauty, and tragically moving, if we remember that shortly afterwards this subject of the hummingbird would die at the righteous claws of the Mexican eagle.

I was able to read them thanks to Alfonso Reyes, who—like me, like anyone who reads them—was captivated. They appear in Volume IX of his Complete Works under a suggestive title: Maximilian Discovers the Hummingbird.