Tierra del Fuego

You who see our homes at night and the frail walls of our conscience, you who hear our conversations droning on like sewing machines —save me, tear me from sleep, from amnesia. Why is childhood—oh, tinfoil treasures, oh, the rustling of lead, lovely and foreboding— our only origin, our only longing? Why is manhood, which takes the place of ripeness, an endless highway, Sahara yellow? After all, you know there are days when even thirst runs dry and prayer’s lips harden. Sometimes the sun’s coin dims and life shrinks so small that you could tuck it in the blue gloves of the Gypsy who predicts the future for seven generations back and then in some other little town in the south a charlatan decides to destroy you, me, and himself. You who see the whites of our eyes, you who hide like a bullfinch in the rowans, like a falcon in the clouds’ warm stockings —open the boxes full of song, open the blood that pulses in aortas of animals and stones, light lanterns in black gardens. Nameless, unseen, silent, save me from anesthesia, take me to Tierra del Fuego, take me where the rivers flow straight up, horizontal rivers flowing up and down.