I leaned against the trunk of a tree.
A few faint clouds dilated the sky, and the light
was pure sweetness.
Rocks spread out beneath the endless air,
the color of embers or a fire’s agate.
I breathed deeply, that’s all, under a tree.
It was neither dawn nor a dream.
That’s what the world was like.
Gleaming, the pines were languid greenery
and I could hear the pine nuts crackle as they fell.
I’m in another country, say the maps,
history, or some other detail—
unfamiliar faces, laughter laughing
in a foreign accent.
It’s true this city
couldn’t be my own.
But if I stick a shovel in the ground,
the ground, dampened by winter
splits open as it does back there, and the worm
writhes stateless, in love with life.
And the very same flies also alight
on piles of garbage.
And the reed beds and the cold
speak a language I understand.
My grandmother says the first car I saw was blue.
When I remember that I remembered, I say it was green.
The car no longer exists.
Like an image scratched by a branch in the water,
memories fuse, confuse.
That’s how fragile the past is.
My Father Before the Sea
I run through silver slopes and hills
I feel my body as perhaps never before.
The air is a clean mantle coming
From beyond the grasses. From a place
Uninhabited and vast. All is luminous and green.
I chase a bird that rises, descends, rises again
At times conflated with the sky but reappearing
And the silky grasses form swift ripples.
I breathe, there is so much light. I climb a hill
And suddenly you appear before the sea
And the bird, that I cannot reach, flies above us, moves
away and is lost.
But you are there. You say something to me, barely,
and smile the way you were.
How many things we must have recalled. How many
things
loved and understood. And for me to see you again
before the sea.
How well you looked, father. How well death agreed
with you.
How much silence and distance accumulated in these
strange years of your absence
To see you once more, how sweet. And the sea
That we never saw together, how it shone
from the slow swells, like something
incomprehensible, and at peace.
But suddenly a noise, a rough movement on the road
woke me
And around me remained the murmur of the bus in
which I traveled
The deaf darkness of the distances without limit. The
return to a journey less
beautiful and more sad, in the middle of the desert.
The cold windows, a few
glimmers of unspeakable forms in the night: the long
highway to darkness.
Which city was I nearing? Where did I want to go?
What was I chasing?
You, a moment ago, there, so far away, before the sea
Me on this side now, on this side of dreams
doubting as always, tense and quiet
journeying through the deep desert of the night
Toward cities not mine.
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