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.