I, II
If the histories of skin hide
a dark intuition in their beginnings,
if this heart of mine were armored,
the factory of forgetting that works alongside me,
nothing was as strange
as seeing you and knowing you waited for me,
scattered, beautifully, in debt to the wind.
And yet sometimes I remember…
before meeting you I understood
the feeling of being before your eyes,
because you had arrived
before your own self,
out of uncertainty and memory,
summoning in me a gesture,
an ancient disorder,
that privileged vassalage
that desire asks of us over time.
In the year’s first timidness,
along with cold promises and mornings
unable to change life,
my dreams and your hair came back with the wind
seeking a way to feel themselves
again on some shoulders, sustained
by a heat alien to their own silence.
It was as if I had learned
that the city does not exist beneath the snow,
that our hands touch and think of creating it,
of discovering antennas
and rooftops,
of inventing the waiting of the trees,
the postal zones where
mist dies, as they say,
the smoke of frightening breasts,
the infinite distance of their names.
And suddenly at times I remember
an injury of light
before its own self,
on the wall suddenly, in our eyes,
summoning in me a gesture,
a future disorder…
+++
I, V
Love, you call me, I catch a taxi,
cross the excessive reality
of February to see you,
the transitory world that offers me
a seat in the back,
its refugee vault of dreams,
intermittent lights like conversations,
signs ablaze in the breeze,
which are not destiny
but are written on top of us.
I know your words will lack
that lavish tone, that the unquiet
airs of your hair
will keep the artificial nostalgia
of the lightless cellar where you wait for me,
and that, finally, tomorrow
upon waking,
between things halfway forgotten and details
taken out of context,
you will have pity and fear for your self,
shame or dignity, uncertainness
and perhaps lustful unrest,
the blow given to us
by stories told in a night of insomnia.
Yet we also know that it would be
worse and more expensive
to bring them home, to not hide the body
in the smoke of a bar.
I come without languages out of my loneliness,
and without languages I go towards yours.
There is nothing to say,
but
I suppose
we will speak of this while naked
sometime, lessening its importance,
reviving the rhythms of the past,
things far away
that no longer hurt us.
+++
I, XXV
Remember that you exist only in this book,
that
you are alive thanks to my ghosts,
to the passion I inject in every verse
in order to remember the air you breathe,
the clothes you put on and I take off,
the taxis in which you travel every night
(siren and heart of the cab drivers),
the drinks you share in bars
with people who live on those counters.
Remember that I wait for you on the other side
of the train tracks when you arrive late,
that the telephone, uncomfortable sentry,
becomes a guest without news,
that there is an empty rumble of elevators
complaining alone, convening
as they lift or lower your nostalgia.
Remember that my kingdom is the doubts
of this city that has nothing but haste,
and that freedom, terrible swan,
is not the nocturnal bird of dreams,
it is complicity, toughness
wounded by the sword that forces us
to know we are literary characters,
true lies, false truths.
Remember that I exist only because this book
exists,
that I can kill us both by ripping a page.
+++
II, VI
You who are not the sea,
who trembles like a bird when wind looks at you,
who wanders the rocks, the sun of the shore,
the reason of the ocean.
You — this awakening without a compass —
who navigates the wisest calm and the storm,
unpredictable weather, tempestuous skin
at the light of the sheets.
You who are not the sea,
who will not always return,
who fills with written bottles and hangovers
the lips of the earth, the cloudy waist
of the last moons.
You who gives order to salt,
you will have a long dream,
they will tell you the story of a shipwreck.
+++
II, XIII
In September
your lips fill with cellars
and the sky is prejudiced
having seen you question life.
Yet also the sky,
wrinkled and precise
like your teenage windbreaker,
wants to be halfway open,
shine, having been recently loved,
resting in the grass
the weight of its long mane of cloud.
In September
yeses fill your mouth with smoke.
+++
II, XXIII
If once you had never existed,
if the heat of your thighs had not
sought me like a precise heartbeat
and my elective ambiguities
— the darkest days of my self —
had not had you like a credit
of affirmation or excuse,
it is possible
that this return home in loneliness
and too soon
would remind me now a little less
of the teenager who wagered the world,
with the world at his back.
Only love is hard.
Mired in the night, returning
between authority and lies,
we spoke of power or of dreams
when we talked of embracing.
And maybe I do not know, I do not know if I remember
myself as a prisoner of a body or free alongside it,
seeking salvation or in servitude,
miserable and damned, but amazed.
Maybe this is only about your absence,
about the fact that loss is hard for everyone
and I lack love, as you know.
Maybe with you I was
far too close to its kingdom,
which I need now to deny,
to use the tricks one has
to be able to keep going.
Because we are surely this way,
mistaken husks,
lonely bonfires in the road,
paradises of four rooms
that one only understands
after having signed many times,
just here,
where
it says The traveler.
And for me, because I prefer to hide my defeats,
I want you to remember me defeated,
like he who waits for something
beyond time and facts.
Maybe because we should have foretold it
or because, in any case, no one knows
where dreams end.
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