I am the great rememberer

I am the great rememberer, the one who makes the threads memory, who sews the drool of the past.

Sometimes I go out into the street or I enter the dream to look at the things I should write later on so they don’t unravel, but sometimes things happen with no pause or time to write them down and thus they become blurry as they start to occupy the great ocean you once wanted to explain to me.

I know, you’ve tried to explain many things to me, but I can’t understand anything. Feverish or surprised by what happens in front of us I couldn’t hear what you were screaming at me one afternoon that lasted for months, an afternoon in a park where no children played, but you could hear the sirens of barges running aground, where you could see specters from the pages of a story that told the story of the one who hung the story in large leaves hanging from a tree.

You wanted me to listen to the words and all I could do was be surprised by the sounds, made of waves from an invisible sea, how I became terrorized facing a giant sphinx that emerged from the stones obeying your call and which I haven’t ceased to look for, but since then there are more stones on the shoreline and all of them look alike.

I, who fly through the nights robbing crosses and tablets, haven’t been able to return to my terror, and I don’t even know anymore what the afternoon with the afternoon with the barges was called, or the sound of the tree that threw its leaves on a cold and nocturnal floor… the leaves were dry and I made them fly over our heads… What was the music with Boticell’s spring on the cover called? You didn’t know that I stole angels from Boticelli and that I knew those women were in spring. We were devoured by the season. It must have been autumn… you had a pair of sad and yellow shoes… the wine that stunned us had no name.
Where do the things we don’t remember go? Where were the things we suddenly know again hiding? I asked you this many times and finally you told me the rotting place, memory’s trash heap, the cemetery of memories. And you weren’t happy when you said it to me, because you also told me you had fled on a ship across the sea, that on an island you said goodbye to yourself for good and that everything had been useless.

I say these things because I must have been the owner of certain temporal powers. Maybe this very night and all the nights I have remembered these things are nothing more than my desires to recover the lost power for good by means of the rotting place.

I have returned to the cemetery and search amid the mud of forgotten things. I uncover eyes and phalanxes, half vanished smiles.
I am seeing comets that crash in the sky. No one sees them. I listen to a dead music, I think of monsters who sleep for centuries, I wrap myself in the shell I carry inside me. Nor can places hold on to what has occurred. Maybe there’s a trash heap for them too, an immense and mortuary steppe where the places we once saw and were never the same again fade away: crumbled restaurants, half-burnt parks, tables full of dust and dry leaves, piece of ourselves, gestures that float in the atmosphere, a pair of sad and yellow shoes, words turned into shreds hanging on the wall, poems eaten by carrions, papers, postcards, trash…

I am in that place, in the middle of that spot, turning everything over with my pencil, but I can’t seem to remember what I was looking for… I can’t remember.


(Traducción de Guillermo Parra- Venepoetics)