Poetry
The Fortunate

The Fortunate

Los venturosos

Jorge Fernández Granados

Translated to English by Nick Hill

something is always waiting within us

till that day when it bursts forth whole

like brilliance in the night of our bones

or a knowing so immediate central irreversibly our own

body inside a leap taken a

tremor or birth

and what you called our mistake

was simply our only way

of encountering it

 

it was a precise moment

like the one that decides everything in spite of what we call

destiny perhaps that miniscule and monstrous

bridge where everything is concentrated

in sharp clarity and we awake

in its purified light harbored in that difficult crevice

suddenly opened in the haze by that precise moment

and now I know it was only that precise moment

when I divined that the soul was all that ready

from the beginning to go into that fissure and to tremble in

that light

intimate astonished plenitude and it was perhaps the gift

inside that wayward diamond and the price

of finding it that time teaches us

was perfectly precise

since something is waiting within us

till that day of the encounter

with a maneuver that is no longer ours

but an inscrutable move in the game

of chance an alien act the inconstant

god we arise from

or simply the game where the only

thing that distinguishes us from the dead

moves secret panting alert:

this heart playing

Footprints

 

in my dreams I live in old houses

or I’m a passenger

on trains headed I don’t know where

I have a crumpled ticket in my hand

and I can’t read what it says I

travel in beat-up vehicles full of people

and some say hello

but in those places

I don’t know anyone

 

my feet are wet

and I get lost

on dirt roads or in abandoned mines

following absurd miniscule signs

that only I understand

 

there

I’m invited to mysterious

rituals with circles rocks quartzes

there are stairs too many stairs

doors fake walls and bright shining insects

that crawl on my hands they

spy on me the dead

and there are green lights at the end of a very long corridor

or under water

 

I don’t have a name in my dreams

but I understand when they call to me

(and I don’t know why someone there

calls to me always) that’s why I approach

and that’s why I get lost

 

sometimes I’m ten and sometimes I’m a specter

in them I hear words for the first time that surprise me

and I say to myself

“I’m going to remember them when I wake up”

but waking up

there are no more words

they’ve turned into footprints next to my bed

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