09-06-2021, 07:52 AM
Rayuela
I was going through your books,
the ones I didn’t keep,
to trade them into a strange world
that never knew you.
I came to Rayuela;
it looked as if it had been left out in the rain,
or fallen into a toilet,
swollen, warped, stained,
I started to toss it into a garbage can
but instead thumbed through it
to find hundreds of pressed flowers
hiding every 50 pages or so.
They are all the same flower,
now almost transparent white
more like bizarre squashed insects
but I recognized them from the photos,
the pictures composed of dried flowers
that you made in Spain: a seahorse,
a goldfish, two lovers.
Now this book is a relic of your passage,
the touch of your fingers
preserved one hundred times over:
I’m thinking a cedar box,
sealed with copper nails,
added to my reliquary of pens found
when we cleaned out your car,
and the sun-faded Topo Chico bottle found in your garden.
Then I will build a shrine
out of limestone and cedar
in the oak grove that we cleared together.
Finally I will have a place to pray
and a spirit worth praying to.
* Original thread can be found here.
I was going through your books,
the ones I didn’t keep,
to trade them into a strange world
that never knew you.
I came to Rayuela;
it looked as if it had been left out in the rain,
or fallen into a toilet,
swollen, warped, stained,
I started to toss it into a garbage can
but instead thumbed through it
to find hundreds of pressed flowers
hiding every 50 pages or so.
They are all the same flower,
now almost transparent white
more like bizarre squashed insects
but I recognized them from the photos,
the pictures composed of dried flowers
that you made in Spain: a seahorse,
a goldfish, two lovers.
Now this book is a relic of your passage,
the touch of your fingers
preserved one hundred times over:
I’m thinking a cedar box,
sealed with copper nails,
added to my reliquary of pens found
when we cleaned out your car,
and the sun-faded Topo Chico bottle found in your garden.
Then I will build a shrine
out of limestone and cedar
in the oak grove that we cleared together.
Finally I will have a place to pray
and a spirit worth praying to.
* Original thread can be found here.
The Soufflé isn’t the soufflé; the soufflé is the recipe. --Clara
