Three Poems by Luigi Amara

From Las aventuras de Max y su ojo submarino [The Adventures of Max and his Submarine Eye], 2007, FCE.

From A Quite Restless Eye

A Quite Restless Eye

Max’s eyes ached so badly
due to smog and foul air;
he scratched them constantly
as if a worm was there.

By mistake he took out
his right eye with a blow;
it didn’t hurt, he didn’t scream,
just said: “What have I done?”

It rolled down on the floor
just like a strange marble
and it hit the corner--
there it scared a spider.

But the eye got scared too
when it saw the insect,
like saying: “I can see!”
and it laid quietly.

It spun on its own axis
towards Max, who was crying:
“In that child’s empty hole
is where I used to be!”

Max touched his face and saw
his eye looking at him.
That was a strange surprise!
How could he forget it!

His left eye on his face,
the right one on the floor,
each of them looking at
each other, in a spell…

when he picked up his eye
it was pretty dusty;
he put it on a fishbowl
to clean it among fish.

He wants to sleep that way:
an eye dreams about seas,
the other beneath it,
away from every pain.

But sleep would never come,
he could not close his eye!
He used a pirate patch
Anc locked up his lost eye.

Only thus he could sleep;
two eyelids as black holes,
an eye inside a chest,
a big smile on his mouth.


From Family Portrait

Bald Grampa’s Inverted World

(The only one who believes Max’s adventures to the other side of the world)

Hanging from his feet like a vampire,
Grampa spends the whole day having a nap.
Beholding everything from upside down
is the way he wants his last sigh to come.

“If the world’s upside down, you have to spin”,
says Grampa as if laughing from inside;
with the feet up high, is his grin naught but
the display of his grief that holds his breath?

He always went the other way around,
some say; others say it’s an old man’s craze
but only he knows the cause of all this:

he lost his hair and recalls through the years,
and now he thinks that, flowing inversely,
perhaps his blood will mend the damage done.


From The Eye Poems

The motionless Whale

The whale with his immense wide-open mouth,
makes the way in te sea for a false cave.

White, motionless like a deserted isle,
it throws its watery palm-tre etowards the sky .

It does not even blink, it lets itself
floating on the pleasure of its leisure.

It doesn’t get upset, nor moves; it just dreams.
Food will get to its lips somehow.

(trans. by Aurelio Meza)

Luigi Amara (Mexico City, 1971). MA in Philosophy of Science at UNAM. In 1994 he got the Young Writers Scholarship from INBA, in the area of poetry. In 1996 he was awarded the Manuel Acuña Competition by his poetry book La habitación vacía. His first published book, El decir y la mancha, won the I Poetry and Painting Biennale from UAM-X. La aventuras de Max y su ojo submarino won the 2006 Latin American Children's Poetry Award.