Two Prose Poems

Watery light

through the porthole, then passing through the old and flowered cloth of a small white curtain, a watery light entered that made me look—though unwilling—at the cracks in the building, the weight of the uncovered water tanks, the iron beams that have lost their casings and creak when the flocks of doves pass, dive, rise, hide from this March splendor, flee perhaps. the girl sleeps with a fever, and he is on the floor (prow) upon a cushion. the cats are looking for some moisture as well and they scatter across the cement—now gray, then red—and I think, or rather I taste, between the light—I repeat—the watery light and that wool protecting the remaining stuffing of a cushion also crushed under the weight, his slender tongue entering my mouth. the sharpest point of the tongue that provoked a certain rejection from me then, and now I taste again (with some of the moisture of an oppressive summer heat that will descend mercilessly upon us) and the doves spread out equidistantly again. he has already gone. and there's a craving for a misty rain against the boiling skin, the beating skin (I get up and write to conquer that fear of distances, that trembling over losses) the cloud has become a gray mass (a brain) that approaches and warms in order to obscure any visibility through the anchored ship's window of my room. I'll have to move the pen's fine point over his tongue again. I can't understand how a large body like that can end in its stiletto prolongation. weakness bothers me, now it pleases me. it pleases me and it pains me. gray mass that is almost watery and conquers my throat, burning me (that morning I didn't dare, but how good it feels, straddling my chest, my belly, another's waist, like that: upright). my city is a hot mass with too much texture (overabundance of being), dark mucus, uterus that expands and wastes away and sometimes rains water, sometimes blood. my city's noise is interior and gray, it expands—determined by hormones—that color these suburbs, the rooftops, the mezzanines, sandy or metallic to the touch (the temperature has changed radically and a strong, cold wind shakes the hinges). we've eaten boiled sugar beet. here and there, pieces of zinc rise amorphously, I see them flying, they overtake me. the house, a ship among the entrails (stranded), hyperplasia of the endometrium—he has said. there will be a lot of blood, deep swells. I use the stuffing from some of Elís' animals, or rag dolls, wool too. everything helps here to increase—if the quantifiable distinction is possible—the anguish. my friends were always leaving, first some around age twenty, then others through the forties. years tunneling from my vagina to my heart. the gray cloud draws even closer. so much anxiety over building a friendship and then, they leave (I'll repeat, they will return, surely, they'll return, desecrated, to live together). the closer I get, the more I'm feeling the days as pages (commonplace) and the body of the work hurrying to consume its white time. as I turn the pages, I summon a certain shade, a certain color, to seem somewhat different. a French blue, another ultramarine, some gold. (the eyes I like are steel blue) although I accept variations. the days, I repeat, beyond a shade (a trick), an oblique movement of color, or a cloud's gradual halting, like today, are identical (the feeling of the page that fills itself with signs of weariness to delay death, or to change). and this noise that I know as discomfort, a buzzing in my ear that reveals itself as cheap jewelry (it's not gold yet, just plastic). I write those pages that the days give me with their...