Joan Margarit

I am looking at a photograph
on which a ray of sun is glancing.
So much talking and so much arguing
while our love was slipping away from us.
No logic can cross the abyss
there is between saying I love you and not saying it.
I smile in front of the photograph.
We love for a long time.
How reluctant it is to leave portraits, the sun.

I went down to the garden very early
and, like lance-points, the stars were marking
the distant and exact siege of forgetting.
When I went out into the chill beneath the trees,
a fox, when it saw me, stopped
on the shadowy lawn.
The two of us without moving
for a few moments stood staring at each other
and then, without haste, it went off
towards the darker part of the path.
I saw in its eyes the mystery in my own
and I think that at another time as well,
crossing a lawn one night,
I entered another garden where I surprised
with my glance another pair of eyes.
Something is being sought after. For all I know,
nothing but dignity.
That of life while it goes off gradually
towards the darker part of the path.

I went inside into the darkness of the great vault
where all the tiny lights of dead children
were trembling as in a night sky.
A voice was reciting, never ceasing,
the list of their names, a prayer
so sad no God has ever heard its like.
I thought of Joana. Dead children
are always inside that same darkness
where memories are lights and the lights are tears.
I am too old not to weep for them all.
I have constructed buildings like cattle-trucks
with skeletons of iron. Huge trucks
that will one day come back and drag people
off to an end they already picture.
Because everyone has seen the truth,
merely a gleam on a puddle of dirty water.
The hall of the dead children is inside me.
I am too old not to weep for them all.

Her thigh-bones broken under the weight of ninety years,
suspicious and greedy, my mother-in-law watched us closely,
and that coward of a father-in-law, chronically obese,
held his tongue in ten languages. My son, with a dark,
cold hole in his head, sat stuffing himself with food,
his face in front of the television.
My brother was gorging himself to death, swelling visibly
and uttering obscenities at the white table-cloths.
My parents, withered and dumb from years of mutual hatred,
wore on their faces a look of terminal loneliness.
This was a moral banquet, disgusting, fantastical.
Having salvaged our friendship from the wreck,
you smiled as you gazed at me,
but so many years of monsters have been relentless.

The woman parks the car in a street beside the sand.
She gets out and, slowly, takes out and unfolds
the wheelchair. Afterwards, she lifts the boy,
sits him down and puts his legs straight.
She pushes a few stray locks of hair from her face,
and, aware of her skirt billowing about,
starts pushing the chair towards the sea.
She reaches the beach along some wooden planks,
but the planks stop several yards from the sea.
Nearby, the lifeguard stares at the sea.
The woman lifts the boy out: she grasps him
under his arms and, her back to the water,
walks dragging him while his feet
leave two sad tracks in the sand.
She has brought him to where the waves reach,
she has left him on the sand and gone back
to fetch the sunshade and the wheelchair.

The last few yards. There are always
these cursed, terrible last few yards.
They are the ones that will break your heart.
There is no love in the sand. Nor in the sun.
Nor in the wooden planks, nor in the eyes
of the lifeguard, nor in the sea. Love
is these last few yards. Their loneliness.

The candle, the sparks from the stove
and my sister in the cradle,
where she would die before dawn.
The winter night devours angels,
but that was home:my father and mother
came in with the cold sticking to their overcoats.
The doctor ordered her to be bathed in water with ice.

Once the tiny body had been shrouded,
they put me to bed.
While they were covering me up, I comforted them
saying: You’ve still got me.

I hear a ring at the door and go to open it,
but there’s nobody.
I think of those whom I love and who won’t return.
I don’t close the door but maintain my welcome.
With my hand on the door-frame, I wait.
Life goes on settling itself in pain
as houses do on their foundations.
And I know for whom I linger leaving a sheaf
of hospitable light in the empty street.

She has read every novel
that speaks about couples or about mothers and daughters.
Love stories, therefore.
She hasn’t a whisker of belief in any god,
she doesn’t believe in anything but people.
When I come along with my cynical views,
she listens to me and grows sad. I have realised
how much I still desire her, but she
regards my love as being far from passion,
perhaps through so much death, through having had
a full but difficult life: tremendously full
at times. I haven’t understood her well enough
and don’t know enough of what she has understood about me.
But there is a refuge for both of us.
And I enjoy a privilege: I carry
her poem written in my glance.
I wouldn’t know how to write a poem at all like her.

Just as it was for Sisyphus,
life for me is this rock.
I take it up and carry it to the very top.
When it falls I go back to searching for it
and, graspiing it in my arms,
I heft it once again.
It is a form of hope.
I think I would have been a sadder man
if I’d never been able to heft a rock
with no more motive than for love.
Carrying it for love to the very top.

Don’t pity the man you have been,
because pity is too brief:
It doesn’t give you time to build anything there.
At night, in a small airport,
you watch a plane taking off.
The signal is gradually fading.
You feel the conviction that you are living
through years with no hope that are now (already?)
the happiest of your life.
There is another poetry, there always will be,
just as there is another music.
That of the deaf Beethoven. When the signal is fading.

They taught you to do everything really properly.
Playing obediently, you became used
to the safe places which one day would fail you.
Order is as dangerous as disorder,
they are the locked rooms of childhood
and at the same time the draughts, the slamming doors
in a house where nobody now lives.
With a shy smile you come from a long way off,
from your peaceful black and white world
with a mother and a coal-burning stove
and a gallery with thin window glass
through which the heat of one weather escaped
towards the cold blue sky of an island courtyard.
You started to become used
to not trusting yourself. To not knowing
you had done something wrong so that you could come back
with swearwords you didn’t utter
and scornful gestures that weren’t you.
Loving is something you did well,
but as for life, how much death it brought
to your hard eyes which now have gone back
to expressing the shy tenderness
of that well-behaved girl in black and white
who learned to do everything properly and well,
so that she could save our love all these years later.