Tu eres sola entre las multitudes
Como son sola la luna
y solo el sol en el cielo
Ayer estabas en el estadio
En medio de miles de gentes
y te divise desde que entre
igual si hubieras estado sola
en un estadio vacio
******
Si tu estas en Nueva York
En nueva York no hay nadie mas
si tu no estas en Nueva York
En Nueva York no hay nadie.
These two poems take another break from political matters in order to focus on love, this time in terms of perspective. In both poems, the beloved is placed against
the backdrop of an unidentified multitude. Though many of Cardenal’s epigrams seek to extend the singular, individualistic voice of the poet in love into a more collective register, these do the opposite
by creating an irreconcileable breach between the collective and intimate. The beloved is not a member of the collective, but in the eyes of the poet she is the only one who truly exists.
In the first poem “Tu eres sola entre las multitudes” Cardenal plays with the notion of being singular “eres sola” and being alone “estas sola”. The use “ser” as the primary verb in the first stanza echoes this notion of singularity. The beloved is unique in her existence just as the moon and sun also are. It’s interesting that the second line breaks immediately after the world “luna”, creating an enjambment necessitated by the use of “son”. “Son sola la luna/y el sol en el cielo”. “Son” is a plural conjugation of “ser”, but by breaking the line so that “luna” and “sol” are separated from one another, the singularity of each is emphasized. Though there are both a sun and moon in the sky, they are ontologically separated from one another, not unified. Similarly the beloved is a unique being in this stanza, although spatially she may be found “among the multitudes”.
In the second stanza, the verb “estar” is used to displace the adjective “sola” from an ontological meaning (singular) to a positional one (alone). The beloved yesterday was in a stadium full of people, but the poet found her at the moment of his entry “as if she were alone”. The shift from “ser” to “estar” however, doesn’t alter the ontological nature of the beloved, but rather serves to reinforce it. The fact that he spotted her immediately in a crowd of people is due to her singular nature. The poet can find her as easily as he could find the sun in an empty sky, simply because there is only one.
This notion of the beloved as a “singular” being is picked up again in the second poem. In this brief, four-line epigram Cardenal uses New York City as an imagistic shortcut, an visual and geographical icon to call to mind the idea of an immense, throbbing multitude of people against which the beloved potentially stands as the only one who truly exists. What is interesting here is that the beloved isn’t actually described as in NYC. The poem is written as a pair of conditional phrases, “If you are in New York, in New York there is no one else./ If you are not in New York, in New York there isn’t anyone.” The multitude of the city, like the multitude of the stadium in the previous poem do not exist in the eyes of the poet, it is only the beloved who does. This seems to be a reversal of the tendencies of epigrams such as the Claudia poems, in which the individual love of the poet is collectivized to the point where the beloved ceases to exist. Here it is the collective which disappears, or ceases to matter. The poet and his beloved are alone in a world built for themselves.
