Inmediaciones / Rafael Cadenas

Contiguities

Sleep has succumbed. At this instant there is nothing beyond those sleeping rooftops and the tenuous thread that brings them. Only this, what I look at, the other life.


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Earth, so careless. I was nourished by the heat of tireless specters. But what surrounded me, the illegible, I had set it aside.


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Reality, a crumb from your table is enough.


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Ceding to an inertia, set aside with no pain, living milk, with its burning mouth contour, an open secret, a spring robbed for centuries.


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Without it there is no flame. Without it each one of my steps brings me back. Without it the names take control of the world.


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I am what I miss, I am my own nursery, I am the other side of myself. I don’t want to be repetition but novelty. The novelty of what I lack.


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You ask for nothing. You know you’re complete. You know it with your skin. Not even your self is yours.


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The soft gesture by which you live doesn’t betray like you the tenor of nature.


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Stillness, gift for that unknown person who leans on the balcony in shirt-sleeves to watch the night over rooftops without resolving anything.


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I have wanted to demolish myself; be an omission to be reborn.


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I don’t erect myself from what I was. I set myself aside, but don’t stop carrying myself. I can do nothing.


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I am memory, memory that recognizes itself. What else? Nothing, only this.


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Floating from the still waters, from the wounding brushes, from beloved deafness. Alone, doubting my sense, to be what barely shines. What is so foolish.




Memorial (1977)




{ Rafael Cadenas, Obra entera, México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000 }