The Ascension of the Leaves
The wind
Weaves living phantoms in the mist
That brush against me as I wander.
The city:
Desolate abundance.
Everything pushes me away,
Yet
Everything pulls me along.
Fog inside an inconspicuous flow
Lifts the leaves from the ground
Suspends them in another nothingness.
On another page,
Clean of centuries and their ashes
Now in the sky,
Intact—
The eyes of childhood
Trace
A bird.
It arrives
Like an ageless phantom upon the water,
Bare of deities,
Wrapped in a glow of a thousand needles
That dissolve at your touch.
As you walk over the wet stones of the quay,
The lights of the city
Fade in the background into the folds of a dream,
A foreign sensation overcomes you,
From one instant to the next
You were going to disappear.
The world erased, only the sound of water remains—
The exquisite proximity of the water seems to murmur
a frothy threat.
All of that with the promise
of your footsteps in these sheets of mist.
Photograph Found in Drawer
That child suspended
In a sheet of air
Looks this way—
Eyes full
Of glimmer and night.
They emerge
From spilt milk
Of days and years,
Through vertigo and vomit,
Already my son
And of death.
Ancient Rhythm
I am no more than time.
A newborn time in ruins,
fresh from ashes and mud.
An ancient rhythm,
primordial,
echoing to reach light
or nausea.
An elastic clay
bidding for the branches
of countless faces already foreign;
of limitless dead already faceless.
Time,
a dark energy tracing these strings
and the clarity
unraveling them.
Translated by Joaquín Gavilano
