THINGS

for MaxDajreaux

I love the things I never had, 

along with others

that I no longer possess.

I touch the silent water,

still in cold pastures; 

without the wind 

it used to shiver

in the orchard that was my orchard.

I look at it

as I used to look at it; 

it gives me strange thoughts, 

and I play slowly with this water

as with a fish or a mystery.

I think about the threshold where

I left behind happy footsteps

now foreign to me,

and on this threshold I see a wound

full of moss and silence.

I'm searching for a poem that I've lost.

It was told to me at the age of seven.

She was a woman baking bread

and I can still see her saintly mouth.

A broken aroma comes in the wind. 

I'm very lucky if I sense it.

It is a slender and tenuous aroma,

the perfume of almond trees.

My senses become children;

I seek a name for this 

and don't get it right, 

and I inhale the air and places, 

looking for almond trees 

but I don't find them.

Nearby a river always sounds.

For forty years it has been my intuition.

It is my blood's exercise in song

or a rhythm that I was given.

Or it is the Elqui River of my childhood 

in which I travel upstream and wade.

I never lose this place.

Our hearts are united 

like two children; 

we have each other.

When I dream of the cordillera,

I walk through slim passageways,

and continue hearing,

without a pause for mercy,

a whistling, most a curse.

I see to the edge of the Pacific,

my pale archipelago,

and from an island

a bitter smell of the dead halcyon

clings to me.

A spine, a grave and sweet spine, 

ends the dream that ] dream.

It is the end of my road 

and I rest when I arrive.

Is it a dead tree trunk or my father,

this vague spine of ashes?

I don't ask, I don't disturb it.

I lie down with it in silence and sleep.

I love a stone from Oaxaca

or Guatemala, and move closer to it:

red and fixed like my face 

with a crack for breath.

When I fall asleep, it remains naked; 

I don't know why I overturn it. 

And maybe I never possessed it-

it is my tomb that I see.
 
 

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Page last edited February 14, 2000
by: PhoneBoy