Tailgater, indeed.
There are some poems that require a context if one is to fully appreciate them. Something that may be quite clear in a specific political or cultural context often sails over the heads of the uninitiated. This poem may be one instance of that.
I am going way out on the proverbial limb, which I have often had sawed off while I sat on the far end, but it seems to me that this poem harks back to the Chile of Salvador Allende.
There is a Latin American expression "hablar a calzón quitado" which means "to talk frankly or openly", roughly "to put one's cards on the table". That, I think, is what this poem is really about
: the "washing" of the post-Allende government, the still dirty laundry of the Pinochet dictatorship.
More neck-out-sticking. I wonder if the butterflies might not have their origin in the anti-Fascist poem by Montale, "Hitler Spring". In translation by George Kay, the first stanza goes thus:
Dense the white cloud of the moths going mad
whirls about faint globes and on the embankment,
streches along the ground a coverlet on which
the foot crackles as on sugar; the coming summer frees
the nightly chill that tll now was enclosed in the secret pits of the dead season,
in orchards that from Maiano clamber down to these sands.
from the second stanza:
(...) the rite of mild executioners who do not yet know blood
has turned to a foul reeling of shattered wings,
of wraiths at the river-edge, and the water goes on gnawing
the banks and no one now is guiltless.
And ends;
with the breathing of a dawn that tomorrow for everyone
may show again, white but without wings
of horror, on burnt wadis of the south . . .
The equivalents translated by Jonathan Gallasi :
The thick white cloud of mad moths whirl
around the pale lights and the parapets,
spreading a blanket on the earth that snaps
like sugar underfoot; the coming summer
frees the night frost locked in the dead season's secret cellars
cellars and the gardens
that scale down from Maino to these sands.
(...) the feast
of the mild murders still innocent of blood
has turned into a foul Virginia reel of shattered wings,
larvae on the sandbars, and the water rushes in
to eat the shore and no one's blameless anymore.
**
with the breath of a dawn that may break tomorrow for all,
white, but without wings of terror,
over the scorched rockbeds of the south . . .
Having followed up this hunch, I started to investigate the poet and found this encouraging text at
http://romancelanguages.missouri.edu/people/leal.shtml
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My academic interests include contemporary poetry, postdictatorial literature and criticism, social movements and art, and (post)Marxist theory. My dissertation focused on how literary criticism enlightens our understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, examining Chilean postdictatorial criticism and fiction, such as poetry, films and novels.
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