Poetry books
Essay
Falling
1
The move does not take long and what remains
is for the sun to fall over the present.
The sun has nothing to do but insist,
to make the hours last, incinerate
the waiting and suck the color from the blinds.
Doing nothing gives us a place in time
and I listen to the churning
of which the afternoon amid the buildings and
the convalescence of the blue consists –
the roar of traffic, the urgency
resounding overhead in this room of ancient crises now
being emptied, this unfurnished echo. I listen to the afternoon,
to its core of nothingness in which I now find myself.
If the other side of infinity isn’t nothingness
then in the end there is nothing – yet there is this being here.
We were voices in the still house
with the useless significance
of conversation after the day is over,
and now I watch the horizon spinning
as if caught in a waterwheel. Twilight
is being crushed in the spokes.
Nations grow dark on the flagpoles
at this hour when the sun is an enigma
the failing day tries to resist,
like showers streaming water over no one in particular
on beaches joining with the night.
Lights mix with the sun behind lace curtains –
it is not just that the day is growing dark,
it is humanity reuniting
with its essential hour beside the lamp.
The last moments of things coming to their end
are always stubborn and this fading sun clings to the hours
like a persistent wound
that almost doesn’t hurt anymore,
or the way cities endure the darkness
and live on like a light
burning in the face of the moon
throughout the long night
turning the sea into a broad avenue
and the avenue into a sea of sleepless light.
Moon, satellite of itself, white smile
devouring the lunatic’s nerves
in his cell in the insane asylum.
Yet the moon remains outside, watches over
reality, a white eye
floating over the earth though contained within it,
creeping in the insomniac’s windows,
ransacking apartments, invading,
or traveling alongside the airplane passenger
(when he arrives at the hotel there it is),
subjugating the tides of the sea.
The sea – inspiring obsession and peace, resurrecting time
even after the relentlessness of death, its tides fusing
that which is lived with that which is dreamed,
leaving eternity empty handed.
The sea gives breadth and distance,
an immense coolness, a sorrowless love.
The protest hurts more than the punishment.
I survey the damage and turn to the certainties
that have no end.
2
Yet we may wake.
I look into the cat’s half-closed eyes,
slow, celestial, ancient – Egyptian cat
that went with its master into the next world
and now wanders around the garbage cans
cautious and confused
in a world without pyramids.
Peace comes from far away. I think of it
when I hear the morning light
with its faith in itself and in us,
in the sand, in the street cleaners,
in the man searching for metal objects on the beach.
No one operates on the morning –
crumbs from yesterday find the doves,
the street cleaners erase that yesterday,
the metal detector, like a magnetic dog,
tries to find the shimmering remains of the twilight.
Life doesn’t glitter like a bracelet
but it too is fortuitous and is often thrown away.
Who finds the life that we use up?
It returns but not as something detectable.
I have come down to see if the day was here,
to see if the air is fluttering after death
in an opening and closing of shutters.
To see if another light is taking refuge in this light.
I have come down to see if the sea was here,
to see how the spray is coping with its terror
on its return from those annihilated islands.
The whisper of the memory of a shipwreck
though at my feet its insistence swells.
The morning witnesses the failure and falls silent.
The morning like the ashes of snow.
Alone this hand tosses sand to the wind
but it’s like giving air back to air.
This air that whirls over the planet’s skin,
blowing into its unhealed wounds:
the death that inhabited the living windows
to which we would rise amid elevator small talk.
If I think how dizziness throws itself into the emptiness
and never stops falling the day suddenly slows down.
Our indifference binds us one to another – our memories
sleep the sleep of the boxes.
3
The tree unpieces itself
to its naked core,
that which exists giving way to that which doesn’t.
In front of the hollow of its collapse
I watch the seasons carry on,
watch color surrender itself to its individual shades.
Time still trusts in its coming to pass.
For this transition, my immediate faith.
Peace too requires reflection,
maybe its only unquestionable dwelling.
As a child when I prayed I would clutch
at any illusion, at the invisible,
helpless to the fact that nothing would happen.
What does it matter if I now pray to nothing
in a purely intransitive faith –
to convert consciousness into a point in space.
Now I know how time penetrates
into this shore now slowly growing dark.
Where does the wind come from? Far away.
The shimmer of the water on the leaves
seems to promise that everything will happen.
Does a person have an identity or is he just part
of the landscape that hesitates at a sail?
The rain pecks at the dark sea.
How am I to hold you if you don’t exist?
This exempt kindness that is time
becomes our natural medium
but only once in a while is it possible to
breathe it in, unpiece it,
pronounce month or week
like a man holding out moments to infinity.
I can’t remember months or weeks
but I remember there was an instant that
would reveal the setting of this drama.
Maybe I’m exaggerating
“You young people today, you abandon each other
so easily.” It isn’t easy
to live without the lightness of unity.
With slow diplomacy memories
evaporate and at last the fall finds itself alone
with the echo of broken eternity.
After the storm a silent air
as if something were about to begin
bearing the secret of all it’s heard
in two years or a single afternoon.
Everything happens in the shimmer of the leaves.
4
Something makes a person move out
of the light, push through darkness
through a thinner air.
Someone sets out into the nightfall,
someone calls realities by the name
that occur to him in the dark.
Someone lives in transition. Always
the suggestion of a moment of a light
for which we have no name.
I only know that it’s beating in the darkness
the way a bonfire at nightfall
chatters with the atmosphere
until the air smothers the flames,
leaving behind a naked trail –
nightfall follows, the nightfall
that the fire had been hiding in its light
as if, like a rude mistress of darkness,
it had been making decisions in nightfall’s name.
To live is to try to name
the things that simply happen.
A dark interrogation awaits us,
every step is uncertain.
Words are a concise light
that tremble until night falls once again.
Nightfall after nightfall
and I only know to call it by your name,
you the only certainty, you the light,
the song I take from the air.
When we go together there’s nothing to fear. With you
I pass through joy like on a road through darkness.
But if we go together darkness is not darkness,
the falling of night not as unkind.
Solitude is a rite of passage
that dissolves in pronouncing your name –
a window opens, the air enters and it’s
like a breath of light.
In the darkness light finds light.
The air of this nightfall is enough.
It bears your name and walks like you.
5
Bursts of light shred the darkness,
the night on which this season and I depend
as I watch the opaque sky from the window,
its heaviness, winter’s urgency
to be itself, all at once, with the weariness
of the leaden sun, of stone sun of cloud.
I crave the sensation of existence
and make room for the present –
in the lungs, in the heart.
Who tends the frail water of life,
the hours without hour of grace.
I call it fullness, I call it sea
or peace and exultation
sung for no reason, for every reason –
the thrill of simply saying the things one says.
But also the substance between two souls,
the force of not being and being
in the scene that now lies before me –
the morning light, cold and serene.
I know no way out.
The sun is still here for us, grazing our skin,
resisting when we don’t resist.
Colors keep us company
and friendship sounds like a river.
It may be possible to be in this moment, to open the world,
to give citizenship to the mystery
through which the seagulls soar
in their own unique balance
between being and dwelling, being and being more.
He who loses faith for a time gives it strength
in a kind of mistaken insistence
that grows used to the veins,
to a fraternity so chaotic that only in the
life-giving sea does it find order. I breathe
in time as if this stillness were unfolding.
It will stop to hurt, it will be sweet.
6
Winter will fall as it’s fallen before,
temple of shadow where
the cold sun beats and breathes,
a clear sensation of proximity
always about to be, like the sea itself.
I come to a decision but there’s still room
for other possibilities. It’s like the sea,
the extremes of life that sustain it.
It is possible to be conscious of too much
but only our consciousness can reveal
that we’re as fleeting as the flicker of a match
burning in an absolution of the air,
the coming to life and fading away
of the unthinkable. Stone
that glows in its craving to rise from the water,
colors imprisoning themselves in the light.
Because goodbye is white. You can feel it
in the clinking of the cups.
We strip the world down to its whiteness
in order to be able to go on. The parting
removed not only a presence
but the atmosphere itself – the vivid frame
of a concrete illusion of love,
its coarse habit flowing without question.
We lose each other and our balance.
The ground is no longer solid, it unfolds.
Only the sea is the sea that does not fail.
In the sand wrinkled by the water
almost nothing says it, almost everything.
In the remains left behind I stop,
looking for clarity in chance.
All the materials are there, only I’m lacking.
I return to the market morning
as if it could confirm that commerce still
drives us on at the going price;
nature in the measure of the air
mixed with food and voices,
and it vibrates like the light at this hour
which the clock doesn’t communicate, just the passing,
the procession of dense smells
suspended in themselves, in their certainty.
Now only the certainty of these sensations,
the cold fragrance of fruit
brought home through the unfamiliar neighborhood
to the house that still doesn’t know us.
The echo, the walls. The strangeness
tries to listen to that moment alone
but it’s hard, mixed as it is
with dreams, the future and the past,
the past like the luggage lying here.
There’s no room for so much in one house
and everything waited patiently in piles,
the provisional rooms had developed no habits,
but suddenly the fruit arrived and
the house was filled with the
frantic fluttering of the new sun
when a bird builds a nest in an unused fan,
without us knowing it the funeral green
of promise grew ripe.
The constant reinvention of things
by the simple act of seeing them
lends mystery to reality and the other way around.
Over and over we let thoughts take shape.
Driving down the highway we broke out in song
and later on closed the blinds
falling heavily to the ground.
The sun always rose the way it does now.
And there there will always be stopover cities of
little interest, characteristic of the place
to which love has harmlessly disappeared:
the salvation of contact. New places
– or the old ones – the coming back to which
our peace depends on.
Day always came almost without our noticing it.
And where are the objects, the untouched beings?
For a second there is nothing
and I walk with this emptiness through the streets
giving back to the sun a little light.
I make my way down to the beach. A radio
broadcasts under a blinding sky.
Mid-day is a flattened stone
skipped over the sea that the sea swallows
before it reaches its horizon.
A stone slowly grown tired,
skipping with less and less strength
until it finally gives in to being simply stone.
(From Caída, 2002)