LAPIS PVMEX
Dioscórides,
in the pharmacology treaty from the 1st century,
confers the floating rock, the pumice stone
abrasive properties beneficial to health,
since its heat chases away
all of those things
that darkens the sight.
Milled as finely as possible,
as Alfonso the Wise tells us in his Lapidario,
it has many attributes:
it returns the whiteness to the teeth
it scrapes the writing of the parchments
and rids you of cataract.
But neither of them tells us anything
regarding the memories, these eroded rocks,
debris that emerge from the mount
of the memory and provoke frequent landslides
in the deep regions of the heart.
Some bad memories disappear, gentle and silent,
in the depths of the soul, along with the other rocks.
We never hear of them again.
But others are like the pumice stone:
the return night after night, to clear who knows what,
they rub themselves against you, they tear pieces of your skin off
—this physical territory of memory
where shadows, strange tattoos,
past caresses, gone touches from other days gather—.
No matter how much you want to plunge them inside you,
the always come to the surface,
again and again.
DR. VAN HELSING'S WARNINGS AND ADVICE REGARDING THE PREDATORY SPECIES OF MIRRORS
Nobody knows who produces these serial vampires.
In the daytime they steal our looks and gestures.
At night they seize our days and don't want to hear about ransom.
Time doesn't pass them by: they are Time.
When your mirrors are starving give them
everyting you abound with: wrinkles, dark circles, exhaustion.
Nothing satiates them: turn them around towards the wall.
Sometimes, when nobody's there to see them, they have digestive problems
and then throw up more than they have swallowed.
There's no use in breaking their surface: if you blow them to pieces they multiply.
The only way to kill a mirror is to put it in front of another one.
Nobody knows why, but —recognizing each other— they instantly go blind.
THE BRIDGE IN THE FOG
I stop
halway
and listen.
At one end
the one that I was shouts:
Wait for me!
At the other end
the one that I will be whispers:
Follow me.
And the bridge, eternal,
doesn't stand the weight of the three.
THE WORLD IN QUARANTINE
After many foggy days
after they laid wrapped in cotton,
all the world's things healed
and are again what they were before:
the twig didn't want to be a bird anymore,
nor water be stone,
nor reality desire.
They emerged from the fog more tender,
more obedient and softer.
And here they are: as if someone,
in all this time,
had dipped in milk
dried crumbs of bread.
A NAIL IN THE WALL
Yesterday it was still sustaining a painting with punctual obsession
perhaps a portrait that the moving truck
took today together with the other objects in the house.
In its place, on the dark wall of the living room
remained only the precise trace of a
clearer rectangle: a state of bliss, a pristine
territory that the nail —still and solitary
insect— insists on protecting it.
Neither the rust, nor the humidity, not even other hands:
nothing will be able to pull it out of its place
or make him give up his new mission.
Somehow, from the depths of his mineral soul
the nail thinks, suspects, and then figures it out —one nail drives out the other:
it has achieved the deserved promotion and now the time
entrusts him his best self-portrait, his great masterpiece.