translated by Matthew Brennan

Five years ago I had a round afternoon.
From inside the cafe we were watching the low sky, a cotton bedspread
thick with dreams and caught upon the fingers of the winter branches.
From inside the cafe we were listening to the gray flute of the wind and the street-dance
of the leaves, of the few that remained on the first days of January.
We had a round table by the window with the full aroma
of the coffee from our cups. Coffee without caffeine because my belly was round and
also full of dreams and heavy as the sky.
In the circle Gabriel and I and a memory suddenly lit,
and outside the slow step of the fog was hiding things: the totem of Occidental Park,
for example, of which remained only scattered signs.
But the clusters of lamps on each pole were glowing,
above every dream, round and clear above the park and also full of dreams
like my belly and the sky.
And the afternoon turned on its axis.
I thought of my son who was not yet born and of the part of my life
arriving finally at its destination, but another one was leaving, the one I had been was going
away.
Who is coming now? I asked. Me again. And I smiled.
And perhaps life is that: the grace of turning in the spiral of time;
perhaps life is round and also full of dreams
and of circles that close at the opening of others, and clusters
of all we have been and will be and will be again, and we are not any longer
and all in life is one bright trace
though sometimes difficult to discern, as in the fog.