Windows

Behind every window, an afternoon unfolds. The line of the world is shaken by the song of
birds. The street lends its graphite silence to boys rehearsing a pass, dominating the ball, so
they can transform the traffic island into a stadium. A victory cry knocks murmurs down.
When the ball strikes, the city beats. Let not that scrap of leather burst in mid-air, let not
that city agonize at its final bounce.

As the prey slowly cedes her softness to the predator, thus the light extinguishes the blue of
dreams. Silence is broken by the knot of noise. A lonely howl. The tap of a keyboard as it
pours the universe out onto the page. Shadows spring from a lamp. A country of hands and
fingers slides across the sheet. The prey gives her word: the secret name is for the page.

This is no silver river shining before my eyes. Only fogged-up glass and the deceit of deserted
cameras and lights. Curious how the curtain becomes a border, that beyond the law
of folds and hems there is an identical window and the alarm of a voyeuristic eye, subtly
revealed. I know I am that other eye, I know that I am now the only gaze in the middle of
the night.

The whistling of air fi lters through white fabric, a ghost that glows between the window
and the night. Outside, far from my urban table, is a sustained syllable, a door ajar, the
drowsy voice of a woman I do not know, an airplane that will suddenly touch down. After
the noise subsides, I build an uneven world. A dividing line between my closed body and
the city outside.

A light stain on the wall reveals me in itself, the fragility of the world.
What fascination do I find in this unstable circle?
Perhaps the innocence described in rugged expansion, a yellow stain, a tone that is neither
sun, nor tree, nor feather of a fledgling bird.
The stain is a unique, wounded eye. Exclusion pertains to this dangerous zone on the fringe,
the opaque side of what is not.

On the back of day, the city emerges like a girl assaulted by sadness.
Absence turns her body into a line.
It takes the body, lukewarm, to a table filled with bread and silence.
Through deliberate rumination, the day takes on the virtue of air.

* Ediciones de la Galera, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2011

Posted: May 21, 2012 at 11:19 pm