Distant memories approach me – I am looking in a water well, an elephant is plucking peepul leaves in the dense forest, and her mahout is laughing.
I am sprinting along narrow past-roads, fields of corns
and pulses covered in evening smoke,
the villages of many doors and windows.
It was my fifth grade when I saw a snake slithering in the harvested wheat field. A bare tree and its succulent drumsticks. I saw it in the evenings and in the nights. I made its sketches with the sketches of farmers collecting sheaves, and I with my friends playing in the twilight.
We discovered lost keys, found a man’s shade—beige white— after digging the ground, a mask of a demon in the forest temple,
we looked for migratory birds and unknown signs,
searched for pearls in rivers,
never found the coin named Zahir (that J. L. Borges saw: a ten-centavo piece in the bottom of a well).
We were far; antipodal to Argentina (the country of the blind Borges), seeing the reflection
of that fictional land, of that fictional sky through many other imaginary places.
Once we crossed a ridge which seemed like the end of our world, saw new valleys, small lakes of butter-colored water, unseen animals.
Back then, we played with pebbles in streets, crossed countless eucalyptus trees.
We returned home many times.
A thousand directions reach at one point.
When the place feels the center, it sighs.
Today, I am on the road which opens towards a certain beach. A crowd from 4th Avenue looks at this edge for blue-butterflies. They look for another earth in their own worlds, silently, almost in a secret way, when they run back and forth in the streets, sit in the café.
A long reflection of the sun, a crab crawling on white foam, and, on many memory’s pages,
my feet making clear marks like prints.