V A L E R I E M E J E R
__________________________from ESTA NOVELA AZUL
Translated by Elizabeth Giancola
VIII
In a puddle of lightI found my luck: made of questions
refracted in the depths of the pool.
Saint Christopher helped me across.
Arriving at the shore I was weightless like the page
scrawled with names
that could have baptized me.
Luz is a name that has fallen
from the footsteps of generations.
The giant saint took the page and pressed it to his chest.
I see him in the evenings with a boy on his shoulders,
I see him circle from heaven to hell
like a schoolboy carrying books.
Electric, the dream of the dead spills its ink,
it stains the page of a cancer that grows each second
and then it stops when the horse stops.
Maybe I was nine when the fever consumed me
and fields of cotton bloomed in my left lung.
How can I discern it from my heart?
Pain is difficult to confine,
its pores let water pass and embroider the skin with beads of sweat.
During these days I read the life of doctor Lucano
as the acid apex
of the fever advanced on an army of cells
immaculate.
The nurse passed the doorway as a girl became a coal
of red life between the sheets.
Each day the corridor was the scene of struggle
between two bodies
and the skin was a white chrysalis strung on a branch
swollen with words.
At the boiling point of fever, ribbons intertwine
from door to nodule, from nodule to calyx
and Dr. Lucano can be seen scurrying around like those biblical fish
breeding in throngs.
Excessive contact with the sheets
converts you to a phantom
and invisibility is a talent
to serve the best causes.
Now there are two beside you:
One on your right and one on your left
they lap your hands like clean cats
and they read the rain.
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