Shan Huang Lake in Marbella

for Lidia

What was a Chinese lake doing in that place
with its rushes and birds straight from
Hokusai’s melancholy,
its great yellow butterflies
and the cadaver of a tree changed to a bridge,
and in the background a graying mountain?
Surrounding urbanized beaches,
succession of pompous houses
and chalets guarded by Rottweillers
suggested mournful transactions.
And there, the ancient calm of Shan Huang
invited you to plethoric stillness
changing to cheap fiction all
haste, grinding the routine
of these days, death’s soldiers,
occupied by unimportant things.
The lake finally became a question:
What are you doing here, where money
is the only truth, the sun is business
and the sea is a treasure chest?
Unexpectedly the lake entrusted
its pale lesson with a haiku:
all who find solace in me are
as out of place as I.

The Trucks

I watch trucks pass by toward
the knot of shadow where the horizon dissolves
the roads the city uses to flee
toward the world. In one of them
I know my father carries his shipment
of wine, toying with the scores
of the next soccer game
or humming out of happiness.
A dog has been barking since a buried
morning of my childhood, the sun bursts
in a truck’s cabin, a colossus
it moves by fleeing from its own shadow.
My childhood among its wheels also slips away,
knot of shadows toward the horizon
where a dog, inexhaustible death,
howls at trucks.

Routine

Sooner or later the t falls off routine
and days are filled with the rubble of desire
because oh flesh is costly and has already told us all its jokes.
And old age then
is something more than six letters completing a crossword puzzle
and you go out to the street on one of those days
where everyone
looks like they’ve grown ten centimeters
and the trees raising their plant fists
like a revolutionary parade
and adolescent beauty
tell you nothing.
And you pop an upper as if it were the ticket
to some ruins
and hours drag, you step on
cockroaches and even though they die from their crushed remains
others bloom
and you get the phone, dissected
animal vomiting narcotized words in a language
you understand nothing of,
and then slowly the world darkens
while the cockroaches continue their parade.

Sooner or later the t falls off routine
and you have to invent excuses, illusions, hopes
to once again adapt yourself to your life and schedules.
With the alarm clock roaring at twenty till,
the shower numbing your tiredness,
the black coffee resuscitates you,
the papers filling your head with banal mazes
and the tie you have
to knot twice
because at first for you
the tail is always longer than
the front.

This Wanted to Be a Love Poem

You pull the two yellow handles
and the bag closes.
Later you make two knots
over the orange and banana peels,
dinner’s leftovers,
quite a few dozen cigarette butts
and a dead plant.
Its twelve floors and then some forty steps
to the dumpster, where there’s hardly space for any more bags.
At the moment of leaving it there
a number has been illuminated in your mind:
seventy six. The garbage bags you’ve filled together
are still small in number
if you compare them to the more than thousand
that Laura and you filled;
that’s a lot, of course, a whole dump, if you compare them
to the ten
that, from Marge’s London basement,
you took out headed toward the minuscule can in the backyard.
In Havana Amarilis
each night hung the garbage from tree limbs
—to avoid the proliferation of rats—
together you filled some twenty bags.
It’s ugly, you know, your custom
of calculating affairs in garbage bags.

Perhaps one of these days you’ll forget.
Twelve floors up there’s a light: it’s your kitchen.
In the can there’s a new bag we’ll fill tomorrow.

Under the Effects of MDMA

The moon’s police flashlight rolls through
the facades and I am happy.
Sleeping sun on my chest and through my veins
avenues of light, liquid dragons
with jaws where all my feelings
are being crushed. I am happy.
I don’t know who I am. My body is a toy,
the melted sun blindly dozing
in the insides of a volcano. I am not.
In the seas’ tapestries
waves whisper their secrets to me,
white wave teeth
upon dying at the beach will erase
phantasmal prints, broken nouns
of languages that lost their eloquence.
I write in a perished tongue
that doesn’t know to tell me what I know,
rancor’s buzzards, guilt’s wounded deer,
the message recorded
on wind’s hood, silences
in early morning’s cornice
dissolve the certainty we pursue.
Darkness, shelter me in your helix dance
make me leave unscathed from this trap
of poisoned hooks hiding
in all the aging questions.
Darkness, make my eyelids conserve
crystal’s rose, the sleeping sun
in my chest last, dragon’s jaws still
save me in my veins,
sea’s language know to tell me
—the white wave teeth
in the black sands of a shore
will erase my name with their smile—
the pursued truth that will save me.