Cesar Vallejo

Somewhere in the collected poems of Cesar Vallejo he uses the phrase 'pharaonic sandbank.'

Vallejo's language is the kind of language only a real surrealist can get away with, which is how I came to remember the phrase 30 years after first reading it and which is why I still don't know what it means and don't care.

(It's the edition translated by the poet Clayton Eshelman, a real windbag of a poet, a dark black book published in the early 1970's.)

The book wore me out, I couldn't keep up with it, it was like a beating heart that Vallejo himself had cut out of his own body and placed on the page, blood and everything. If you dared touch Vallejo's heart he'd just laugh his evil little laugh and go right on writing the next poem.

It was and wasn't like looking at paintings by Paul Klee, where everything begins to look like a painting by Paul Klee after you've seen a number of his paintings. Reading Vallejo, little pieces of his language would begin to stick to you, infiltrate your system from the capillaries downward, only to manifest years later in your consciousness as if out of nowhere.

On a bike ride yesterday toward the Marin Headlands, the pharaonic sandbank of Cesar Vallejo materialized. Before beginning my descent from Hawk Hill toward Point Bonita, I paused, seeing that I could either plunge into the unknown or turn back toward everything I'd left behind.

I followed my heart into the abyss in celebration of the great poet Cesar Vallejo, trusting that my love of the pharaonic sandbank would keep me from falling into the midst of some world I'd never comprehend.