Barcelona

I recall that cruel pain in the retinas
the eve when, of a sudden, we saw so much clearer.
It was a coincidence, inexplicable:
first we heard the cheese of a half-million voices
then the camera flashes came in bursts.
How the light hurt, that light so white
it left no shadows, it lit up all under its rays:
how the people shouted facing the barrage.
Afterward, clairvoyance: we learned the truth
of this city of ours made for the others,
we dug up nails at the feet of buildings,
blocks of cardboard blocks of wood, open pails of paint
and other materials for modern, cosmopolitan décor.
I remember your shudder and the question’s tone:
if it’s all a farce, are you and I just extras?
And I looked then as now without knowing what to tell you,
and we walked off in silence, hand in hand
like lovers printed on a postcard.




For Maite Lafarga

The whole year long, a galling wait
for a trilogy: sea, salt, and you.
Then the miracle ensues and August comes
—as it came the summer before.
This year, though, the sand engulfs you
and doing like the rest is impossible:
you can’t make for the wave
and plunge into the joy of the beach
for nothing in the world will you deny what you now know,
not just salt, but ashes are floating in the water.
Not you. You will not forget your mother.




Guileless whales

What joy the play of the whales
when there were no species or hemispheres.
What complicity beneath the sea
before the rift, the stampede,
the elusion without knowing why
to other oceans, and separating,
the inexplicable splitting of the ice.
And never again the timeless days
when all there was to do was leap,
and waves were no longer gifts
but rather mementoes of distances,
the enduring pain of having lost another.

They love, I know they love.
It’s easy to see it in their eyes,
the tectonic movement of valediction,
the anguish in the beasts’ gaze,
how high you and I leapt.




Certainty

Knowing how to interpret the words
of an empty pool amid the cold,
a Ferris wheel stalled on a humdrum Monday
sans sugar clouds or neon lights,
or a circus tent dismounted
—enough of acrobatics, trickery, magic.

Understanding and accepting that they are also this:
tedious days, devoid of attraction,
an eerie landscape that harbors menace,
that makes itself present cyclically.

Knowing this is, at the same time,
accepting the certainty that your body
will not be—cannot be—every night
this present holiday.