[Traveling]
I.
Pointless to think that love doesn’t bleach
the wet sand or island walls, especially
now
that the future
is almost literal. Books: reprieves from
how we act. And at my feet a certain cat plunged
in a simple dream of sparrows.
Imagine the equator between a vast horizon
of pleas and a prophecy of advertising, an enterprising
morning, your hands isolated in a world
of euphoria they don’t understand.
We can take care of ourselves
in a styleless scene, we translate
landscapes: the streak of coast gives back a prehistoric
version
of sound like a boundary; the rest—including
the breathing arris
that stretch the facades—sullenly
exercises against traffic. The promenade’s
hiccupping lung unoccupied by families
is a change of subject, something ruled out
of the conversation in favor of sensual
extravagance. And sprinklers whirl endlessly
on the grass.
Understand me: I say that you outnumber me
if you talk about us, love, but the facts also
compete for the place
from which you returned with new questions each time.
You: a substance put in contact
with its reagent. Me, selfishness without any target.
And your five senses of resistance
still think
so they don’t have to believe.
II.
The wind carries the negative of the faces it has touched
and it’s hard
to track its influence in your gestures.
If this were a great city, maybe we could
visit the zoo—cattle which group together
at nightfall while the tropical fish
in the aquarium inhale
H’s, in a display of humility.
But here we’ve come to separate
the possible
from the expected: everything that matters
and everything
that doesn’t matter waits four hours away
on a highway heading west. Change places
together, equidistanced…. We return to a place
where ability or scruples are worth more
than strength of character, where spiders
are still a thoughtless pleasure. Without domestic
chores that sharpen maternal or paternal
poses, the most fragile
marrow of our naps opens up in opinions
again and again. And in the long run, the light
licks belly buttons, shaved sirens, nights
to drain off without further ado
the wheezing of obsessive
lovers. If I am not me
or it isn’t
the truth that speaks
you can give me interior
models in stone and long views with hardly any
obstructions, something that readies intention
from the edges.
After, sprawled out in parenthesis, a whisper
said there was still time to squander
in inquiries
but I thought that if someone were to see us
he would see a schematic age under an almost
white roof.
I correct myself: you can deny sympathy
and the conscious voice, but not proportions.
My second obligation is to convince you.
Translated by Curtis Bauer
[Traveling] is from Un huésped panorámico [A Panoramic Guest] (Barcelona, DVD Ediciones, 2010).
You can read and listen to the poem in the original Spanish here.