from Line

The Prodigal Son’s Brother

This is all about to leave. There’s a winged cross making a sign of the cross in the sky. Soldiers cut down the last stars to button their uniforms. The trees have all lined up, the smallest so far off. Lambs crash in rolling waves. A little dwarf-house climbs a crag to spy over its sisters’ shoulders, then turns red, starts to cry, shaking in its hand or its chimney a scarf of smoke.
        Behind the eyelids, this landscape is waiting. I’ll open it? In the living room, there are clouds or curtains. It’s the hour when the lights are lit, but the women haven’t come to an agreement about time, and the traveler will get lost. “What took you so long?” they’ll ask him. And since they’ll all be married by then, he—my older brother—won’t be able to advise me to flee.
         And in the darkness, I’ll caress his wounded voice. But I won’t attend tomorrow’s banquet, for this is all about to leave, and, hurling yourself from here, you get to heaven dead on arrival.



Empty Mirror

I search from tomorrow to the last remembered day
I cannot see where I first smelled you
If I only knew the angle from which you plucked yourself sleeplessly
That day you were smoking to make yourself masks
Now none of them disguises you any more than air
The shadow to the left of the sun is undressing you
Now the black half of your face is the same
Your reality is the mystery of the word that names nothing

I suffer your fallen voice         poetry
Was moving in trees and now smears itself in mute carpets
You know there are voices that never show themselves split in two
Certain badly trained mannequins that never deign to turn
They make their would-be buyers turn instead

Now I don’t know how many faces must be tossed to be angels
I’ve been waiting backwards for the year of unpunished vices
I earn them only for this unearned shadow
Look, it’s showering itself also in the soil just to hear you.



Allegory

We’ve missed the train. What a pleasure! What a shame? We open our suitcases; every memory takes its place. They read us unimportant books. They pamper us, graduate us gradually in gastronomy.
        Then we go out to the street, and upon shouting that they’ve robbed us—but if we didn’t accuse anybody!—there’s a pathetic man who offers: “Please search me.”
        He’s an almanac salesman. He’s hawking El más antiguo Galván. He dyes his beard with glass and looks clean-shaven. It’s possible he doesn’t in fact have our watch. Shall we continue with the inventory? A penknife scythe, an hourglass on his wrist. There’s one secret bag, though, we still need to search. Our companions don’t know zoology, but we’ve already noticed kangaroo things in him.
        In the end, we strip him naked and pull him, all gold, from his marsupial pouch. Later this gets very boring, because he has another pouch, which he’s also inside of, which in turn has a pouch . . .
        When are we going to be done reading Proust?



X.

We love them all, obeying their classics, without asking their names. Now I’m going to love you without asking your body. You run away sliding in the sled of cold. The wind dogs pull it. You have a star in your hand, but this is not certain, because on Sundays even the humblest lights put on their fineries and dress like stars. Someone, to his delight, discovers you in Ursa Major and depicts you in a planisphere. He names you something Greek, or after his pathetic heroes. But only I know your name. The sun won’t let me hear it, the noise erases you and I forget; but at night I comprehend you. Name that names nothing, no one’s going to foist orthographic accents on you, no one’s going to fasten you, motionless and relatively eternal, to the epitaph of dictionaries, Unnamed.



Regret

I’d shut out the afternoon that enters at night without waking me
A fish flies to my dream without wrinkling the water’s mirrored skin
I had better cut off its cold contact
A shadow will bleed noises if the faintest light cuts it
Miners born at the antipodes smell my nighttime as day
How would it be in my next dream with nothing but me dead
My own I eyeing me eyeless

At every point in time it is always that time
Dead
Sailors’ steps made the land into another bigger ship
The sea undid its bodice with each wave slimmer and slimmer
I would never have believed the Odyssey without the wind leafing through it
A drunk passed from the bar to the horizon in a harmonious sway
What Diogenes pronounced that harsh word hurts me woundlessly
If God blocked out my sun it’s because it was His



Card

I am listening behind the door. It’s not polite, but they’re talking about me: I’ve heard my name, Juan, Francisco, I’m not sure which one, but it’s mine. The man who is only a photograph of my father—that’s it, in the night, his face and beard whiter than whiteness—that man claims to be me; he lifts his voice: “ . . . what’s my name . . . ” And I can’t quite hear the end, but I know he has pronounced my name, because suddenly his face is dark too, and all that’s visible is his copious beard.
        We take that high path, just a line, a wire at most, from the edge of twelve o’clock. Even so, he manages to fit at my side, since he’s the portrait of my father. If he changed his step, if it weren’t so identical to mine, so that I wouldn’t feel so alone; if his voice sounded different, and in another mouth than mine, so that I wouldn’t chew my tongue.
         There’s a lamp to our right; perhaps the sun. Butterflies of badly remembered faces come to die in it. Being naked, he insists on taking the other side, wearing my shadow; he’s so light that it suffices for him to lean on my shadow’s cane to never get tired.
         At the top of this card is depicted a jack of hearts; on the lower half, an insomniac king of spades, which is the jack’s absurd reflection, marked off by the invisible line of the edge of twelve o’clock. Me, I am far too clean-shaven for my shadow, a mirror that anticipates the image by half a century.