The Valleys I

To Lara Diguistini

At the close of a moment
Encountering the stakes of the day
In the shape of lights and bruises
Uncannily spoken, ridiculed
There's a third space.

The space has been filled by long years
In the vacuous distance of words
That carry so little power to console
But they become witness of a person's life
Of a life that no more ends than it begins anew.

In that room philosophy sights the green grass,
The meadows and the brooks and other forest animals
It grasps smiles from within a womb
Of the living lives of everyday people
The room has a sound odour of childhood.

But the grass cannot always be seen
It is more elusive than it is beautiful
And one finds the writer chasing this precious item
As though it contained truths
He already found impossible to believe in.

Yet he refuses to abandon it all
Seeking a home for his mind in this harsh world
Sheltering spaces of hope for other people
For lovelessness, for the reason of passion
His pilgrimage to your valleys, never to end.

The valley resembles not an infantile scene
Because the suitor can no longer remember himself thus
The valleys attract him with the same flattery of death
And the house stands adrift from this immortal enterprise
It remains washing away the Book of Life.

In his faithless world
There's no other possible destination
Wherein the defaults are not the choice of your sufferings
The fourty days in the desert
Awaiting to see the face of God.

The valleys differ from the churches
Not only in their sounds
But in the taste of redemption they offer
Quite everyday and simple, unhindered
Quite distant, insofar as distancing is only a way to see God.

The world starts to unfold therefrom
As though in a comedy
And retains all the beauty in the space
In the silence of love
The doorkeeper of my own mourner.

With enough truth to embrace it all
To make up for the lies that do one justice
To make up for the remembrance
Of the gray unrestraint clouds that pose their bodies
Far away from the valleys, in the form of dead nature.

"The Redemptor of God"
Thus they spoke about a man
Who dwelt in the desert and after fourty days
Tried to be Moses or Elijah
Received even less than Jesus or us.

The Redemptor hasn't seen the valleys
Hasn't smiled their faces
Or laughed their anomalies
He can never come visit
His doorkeeper slumbers.

In a way I feel happy
To have known the philosopher
Who owns a heart in the valleys
Because more often than not
He keeps himself company.

And one can only wonder
Whether there's any port wherein he's expected
Whether he'll leave one day
And arrive somewhere to be embraced
Because he's more often than not in the company of strangers.

At times he wears the face of Cain
And he weeps, as though no man wept before
And only then one can see
What kind of a child he was
When the gods and the valleys tended to him.

But it isn't that face the one you attach him
But rather one more hopeful than not
That vomits life for the sake of the others
That bleeds the bruising of love
In the most absolute tranquility.

We never knew his ancestors
Or the town of the birth
But we heard about the valleys
In postcards
In unfinished glasses.

He'll arrive home one day
In the valley
But not to stay for long
Rather to discover
That one can have any origin after all.

He weeps in despair
As the valleys distance off
But they always return
To the middle of the desert
Without doorkeeper, without messenger.

They always return
With friendly entreaties
And puns of charade
They warm the air of spring and winter
With some love, some world.

It is this belief what keeps him so safe
From the sufferings of this world
The belief that one day
He will land in the valleys
I promise you, he'll only sit and talk.

And this in the letanies of distances
Remains a most redemptive exercise
That in its atavic happiness
Seems so impossible, so distant
That is in a way a farewell.

As the valleys do not return
He can't let go
Of the memory, of the unity
That the sufferings of the world
One day will land home.

In a valley,
Somewhere in Kerrisdale
Or
Past
The meadows.