Before Choosing
Noise, noise, stopped time, smoke, inverted chairs, words
thrown out of doors like dead cats. A small garden, outside,
for the sundown and the sparrows, no one remembered it.
Don’t go further inside, he said, the mirror ends at the wall,
The lift is broken, and the hallway lamp is burned; you must
climb all the stairs, groping onto the intermittent railings and
go down too.
You have just enough time to look at the glass factory and
the three chimneys through the skylight. Yes, yes, successes
and failures are welcome, he said, they are all experiences.
Excuses, he added and hid his holed hand in his hat.
Cockroaches scratched the carton box in the kitchen; a few
roses were in Tiresias’ shoes. And the dead men kept
talking about their things again, the foreseen dead and the
unforeseen,
many weeks, one by one on a line. Women started coming
from the other side carrying big basins, they kneeled and
washed the feet of the motionless old men, drank the
dirty water, got pregnant, gave birth to dogs, then got
the cages to the balcony, washed lace and sang along.
Libros Libertad 