Written by Víctor Augusto Núñez Regueiro
Translated by Paz Regueiro
Translated by Paz Regueiro
Exactly in my house's lone garden
I am here this evening, my body is here,
a discarded wire,
the plants that grow without knowing
and also — above all —
the walls
one brick over the other
set
beside the one that corresponds, exactly
terribly so,
set.
I look
upwards
and the last lights that cling to the leaves
to not slip into infinite space
are aching my time
slowly.
An ancient blood springs from the evening,
or maybe the old spilled wine
of a sun that starts falling
its deep exhaustion
made over so many journeys
over mature blue, made
made,
every day, exactly the same, eternally
repeated
and simple,
spilling in these hours' cup.
And then
— I don't know why —,
maybe as the evening unraveled me,
I cull men from the depths
of that infinite anguish,
through some open book,
or a "good morning" exchanged in the street,
or some stranger's footsteps
with a sad gaze and empty hands
and an extinguished cigarette
that his shadow smokes.
(Why not?,
white flour bread, aborted in their bones, their thin cheeks,
their nostalgic saliva,
their age matured by now, I have seen
the children
play happily on evenings like this).
I started to go amongst men some time ago,
searching myself inside
and outside, searching myself and searching
between simple things and grand messages,
behind an infinity
that beat in my blood
for nostalgias of unlived things, that I knew were waiting
for me to live them somehow.
My memory is as short
as things are immense,
because I know the beginning
is very old, over by birth,
or maybe long before,
in the first look that announced me
on some evening,
I don't know,
or maybe
on a street without luminous signs then,
or over the course of days traversed
together,
I don't know,
I don't remember it,
it's simple
but I know it grows through my veins
beating me and biting all the time.
This
is what I know
because I carry it.
What I can say because I remember
approaches me in timebetween hiding
and kites of paper and reeds
that the wind would bring me, and books of legend:
I believe it was a tub by the patio,
with its crickets,
the overturned ferns,
small snails under the clawfeet,
and I,
with my uncovered knees
mounting the white spirals
towards ammonites asleep in the stones
and even further back,
until I lost childishness to time.
Everything was dimension,
pure measure,
innumerable figure eights:
the beyond behind the stars,
and after that,
still further,
still,
life mounting species,
ancient sperm,
the lone protoplasm of origin,
alone,
and
atoms the sizes of rocks,
the hills' mineral impulse,
how many men's lives passed by,
those who are yet to come or coming,
and
man,
simply
man become question.
Be that as it may
that's how
I was
on that evening,
in my house's lone garden
but with myself in it
and not the walls erected
and in me
men and all the innumerable things
and I decided to sing them,
in the same way
that the trees
decided to make their leaves grow come summer
Because it was good,
I thought.
Paz Regueiro is a trans Mexican-Argentinian writer, translator, and filmmaker. They are a second-year PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. They currently live in Oakland, California.