The Man Who Wrote on Water
Pablo Medina
Copyright Pablo Medina 2011
Published by Hanging Loose Press at Smashwords
Other Books by Pablo Medina
Poetry
Points of Balance/Puntos de apoyo (bilingual poems)
Puntos de apoyo (poems in Spanish)
The Floating Island Arching into the Afterlife Pork Rind and Cuban Songs
Fiction
The Cigar Roller
The Return of Felix Nogara
The Marks of Birth
Memoir
Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood
Translation
Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca (with Mark Statman) Everyone Will Have to Listen: The Poetry of Tania Díaz Castro (editor and translator, with C. Hospital)
Published by Hanging Loose Press, 231 Wyckoff Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217-2208. www.hangingloosepress.com. All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
Hanging Loose Press thanks the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts for a grant in support of the publication of this book.
Cover art by Edel Bordón
Cover design by Pablo A. Medina
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Medina, Pablo
The man who wrote on water / Pablo Medina. p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-934909-19-5 (pbk) I. Title.
PQ7079.2.M396M36 2011
811’.54--dc22
2010046323
for Silvia Natalia Medina
La hora es un ojo inmenso.
En ella andamos como reflejos.
(The hour is an immense eye.
In it we wander like reflections.)
—Octavio Paz
Man is the intelligence of his soil, The sovereign ghost.
—Wallace Stevens
Often it is hard to know when the middle game
is over and the end game beginning, the pure part that is made more of craft than of magic.
—Jack Gilbert