| In the green water I saw your eye and within it I saw
that Arabian palace
filled with birds and broken glass.
I copy an address onto my right hand
and fill myself with the memories of psalms.
A green fish emerges from the seaweed like the seaweed from the wave
that rises up like the wailing wall.
My sun-baked body at the edge,
the wind in my lungs, its whistle,
my torn world, my grief,
my soggy passport, my shell without a pearl,
you lift them, delicate cloud, into a liquid world.
Last night I dreamed of my father’s flabby body and of my blue
resolve to run away, to find a shortcut, I dreamed of your eye
and for an instant I found the vertex of the road,
the imaginary line that falls across the earth;
that meridian where sun on a tiger’s back meets the shade
at its belly.
Waking up we are swallowed by wakefulness.
The house swallows us in its terrible thirst.
The compulsion to take our children
to school swallows us
and so does the if only l could.
Something was in that dream. You know it. A direction. A shortcut.
A forest as green as you and your roots.
Give me your premonitions, give me your book, give me your prodigious
memory,
give me that blue gaze in your dark eye, give me the devotion of your
sleeping birds.
Sometimes that shortcut is a fire
through which the circus tiger
leaps, a perfect circle
returning to me with its stripes intact
and with the endless continuity of this necessarily feral world.
Translated
from the Spanish by Forrest Gander
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