For Vallejo, in fact, the poet is marginalized even from himself: “Chances are, I am another, walking, at dawn, another who moves / around a long disc, an elastic disc.” Vallejo, in a sense always sees himself as proleptically dead, as Emily Dickinson did several decades earlier, allowing himself an almost mythic perspective at once far removed from the mundane, and yet dealing with its images in an intimate way — a poetry of vascillation. He even forecasts accurately his own death in Paris in the rain years before it happened — and he ends “Chances Are” with “posthumous suspicions, / this index, this bed, these tickets.” Even the last line moves violently from circumference (the list of things in the poem working against him, an index, and also the “index” of banned books) to the center where he finds himself in a bed, to the tickets which will take him away, to a place where “beyond there is nothing.”

A similar self-estrangement occurs in the the poetry of the Pakistani, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984), imprisoned three times for his resistance to an oppressive British government. His poem, “My Visitors,”^[10] begins by listing the visitors to his door — nostalgic evening, brokenhearted midnight, a torturous morning, a searing noon; time itself, in other words. The realities of the oppressive world knock at the center where he should be. But Faiz has already constructed a mythical world like Hernández, as distant as that of Vallejo, for he ends the poem:

Here the poet has deliberately chosen a periphery to escape the sorrows and injustices of everyday Pakistani life, and the “home” now seems something different than the “house” where time knocks, a place removed, detached, beyond the horizon. The periphery becomes an ethical choice, but whose makeup, beyond the horizon and reach of the center, is necessitated by political oppression, by “fears, questionings, forebodings.”