Night Journey

Hurqãlyã, Peregrine City

Vigilant, the wind witnesses everything. As if deigning an imprint on reality. But we are lost. In the cold city, in the violence of asphalt and parking lots, mirrors are sleeping birds. No triumphal fires, the mountains of Qãf invisible. The night and its nook, for a little theater: the I. How long will we continue to be surrounded by marshes? How long will death conceal its country of white cities? Its keys that open on the Great Ocean? Its many vacant lots where for an instant the unsaid gleams? Farther on, say the guidebooks, beyond tension and kinks, is the habitat of the true word, that phoenix dwelling in the scaffold of the soul. You must select a single grief, one only. Renounce fear. If you hear a round ring of silence, listen: it too is a world.

Midgard

It appeared in the center of emptiness, all of light, as if it had been there for centuries, for an eternal noon and moonlight, creation of an invisible god, the god of suicides and also of those more docile beings who consent to eat and drink for the sake of reality. There it was, orphan, unmoving, descrying the world and even those creases in which poems search for the lost. It seemed to be biting its tail. That is why (we thought) the future repeats itself, traitor and betrayed are one, plagues recur, circular evasions, memory, that mutilated animal. Its skin was of ice, its belly of crystal, libidinous. We watched it from our dying city as if watching a fragment of an even greater splendor, a truth about to slip away. One of us said, “Time.” Afterwards, we were silent. Such immobility brewing. And the dawn, passing forever.

The Three Madonnas

A forest or garden of shadows. Everything on the verge of burning or exploding, as if something had been mislaid and had to be found. Three women (or one, declined in three bodies) pass through wide-open portals. Bells begin to ring, more and more lugubrious, flashes of light to appear; perhaps they occurred in a dream and someone forgot and left them here, like corpses, on this rare green. The winds, high as pines. The oldest woman wears an antique dress, a hoop skirt, dainty piqué violets on her parasol. She holds a letter addressed to Sèvres. The second is the sensual bride of dusk. The youngest, a grave and mysterious girl stunned by the beating of her own heart. One by one they pass through the invisible doors, each one in her own portion of shadow, as if nothing could distract them. They seem not to fear the mossy trees or to be in love with their own death or to believe that beyond all doors lies God. Night comes. All beauty dissipates, swift as autumn.

Blindness

The refugees in this camp stand in line with their empty plates. It is an immense line, from famine or plague, inordinate helplessness in a country already run wild. As usual in the footsteps of decay, fear grows, the future hibernates in lengthy descriptions of death. Men pass by, driven by the warm air, unable to reach reality. Something in their own suffering holds them like a magnet in an enormous, senseless, magnificent mirror. Unceasingly, spurred on by the ephemeral, unhinged by a wave of assault and whimpers and inconceivable nothingness. But I am walking back; I retreat not knowing why until I reach the end, where there is a food cart. Suddenly a young boy appears, notices me dubious, like a fugitive or a culprit, like someone assessing a trespass, a blindness as yet unfulfilled. Imperceptible the moment in which he vanishes, without a trace, like a fire gone out, and I am left standing there, knowing nothing of him, nor the refugees, the hunger, nor the phrase he has just uttered, now floating in a halo of dust, irreducible and amputee.

Windows of the Century

A military museum overlooking the ocean, this is where I am to spend my vacation. Through the tall windows...