I Saw My Mate In His Jockstrap

Mermaid


Ages heaven black moonless night, you were the wind that blew westerlies. The sea down there wallowing without mercy on the weary sands echoed by moans of agony all the caves in the Great Cliff and I are here.

Ages the secret that all birds kept, that they all spoke in the weary days of end of March when they gathered to try to make sense of things.

Ages rhythmic light lighthouse sweeping the limits of the darkness beyond the site where the land ends and the sea falls into the absurd vastness of space.

Silence. Forget everything you learned. You are who you are and nothing else. We know nothing beyond the contours of our bodies, and the more space we gain weight in life. There are more of us to know every grass, every millimeter stolen in the mirror at our reflection.

Silence. Forget what you were taught. There is nothing to know beyond you. Close your eyes, there's nothing out there. Only you. You were what was out there to know, to be known. You were the boats arriving for the full tide of hope, and returning empty bringing hunger and tired faces where the age was noticeable especially around the eyes and mouth. And here I am. You were the lonely road that cut through the pine forest in search of the Atlantic to lose yourself in the hot sands, once. And here I am. You were the elderly lady who walked arm in arm with her husband and a dog leash by the centenary, an attitude of who walks both: here the dog urine and later will make her husband. You were the little boy who repeatedly pulled the arm of his mother, trying to escape and, perhaps, going to hit, run the seagulls. And here I am. I standing here in disbelief, while police and firefighters went towards the beach. Deafening sirens, screams of all the deceased of the world, called the place dozens of onlookers to cover your naked body, torn against Cliff where he briefly closed his eyes and ages all around you. And so suddenly, even with open eyes, the landscape has disappeared from my horizon a white canvas awaiting the skilled hands that paint again with the faint traces of your life.

(Photo: Port of Boats, Portugal, October 2007 / Text: Coimbra, Portugal, 1997)

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