FROM THAT DARK ANIMAL OF SLEEP
I’m surrounded by somber airs.
They suffocate me and silence my words. They are words from distant
times, when the roads were spacious trails and I would travel them in
a transparency that was granted me by chance. Everything seemed at hand
and distant. They were times of lucid summers, of trees where birds
of vivid colors would build their nests and from the earth rose a warm
vapor, a silent fog that would settle over the patio. Windows with balusters
seemed to protect a dense quietude that kept the screams and wails very
far away. Today I’m sharpening the ear to listen once again to those
secret words I hadn’t yet discovered, they would arrive, burning and
trembling at a previously set hour. They came and went. They stopped
for a fugitive instant that barely contained my breathing. I evoke them
this afternoon of dark airs and feel how they deny themselves to me.
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I’m against everything, the one who told me I love you, the bird that
flew off, the diaphaneity of the sky, the downhill trail and the trail
that crawls upward. A cloud passes and the air passes. The voice is
dissolved in space and there’s a perennial longing in the earthly spot
where I find myself, an annulment of everything as though a giant sponge
had erased life. I recall the other times, the transparency of the air,
the bonds of love, the infinity of hours cultivating each instant and
that taste for things, that recreation of touch, my fingers on an animal’s
skin.
+++
I’m listening to the trembling of a distant night. A night that murmurs
amid its dense foliage. I’m barely listening to it from this closed
place where my spirit drags itself over hard foundations that wound
me without bleeding. I want to penetrate the night, know of its occult
aroma, have it fill me slowly with its stillness, its adventure. Go
towards other continents where the night turns, raises small things
that soar intact in a flight toward the skies. This night is magic,
its curvature in sleeplessness. The wind carries me in its fervor to
imagine another recondite and generous night that could illumine me
completely from afar, from outside, and clear up this babbling subdued
without violence. This night is so long.
+++
Here where I’ve stopped I listen to strange sounds, flights of invisible
birds, and I think of a firmament only my mind retains. Stilled I’m
awaiting some diaphanous delivery, an ignored promise. The air is tinged
with an impossible color and the wind intensely shakes the crossroad
trees. In these parts of the world behind white mountains no one dares
pass. Maybe the fear of death, a quick death with no time for pain.
I hope the night will sprout with its mystical torment, its mantle of
darkness. A star might shine in this wide open air that never has any
end.
+++
The house collapsed. It left some scattered dust, slabs of hard cement.
It also left memories scattered everywhere. The roof that overflowed
with the stirring of doves also came down. I don’t want to rebuild the
house, lift new walls, or doors, or roof tiles, or a small window through
which the world passed, or that wide threshold where the front door
towered and I would penetrate the days, nights, seeking my warmth there.
The house collapsed, a transparent house where the day would light up
and a thick darkness would tremble at night. Nothing was left of the
house, not the light on the walls nor the patio’s splendor. Only silence
moves through the vast empty space and the sterile words whose thin
filaments the wind will dissolve. I will remain in the open air watching
the fog in the trees until the arrival of death, a house erected by
time that will never collapse.
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