Rayuela

[TranquillityBase]

Thanks Tmanzano,

This is a slightly revised version.  Can't really bring myself to cut the other bits of the reliquary, but I get your idea and it's not a bad one.



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 dozens of  dime-sized 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 recognize them from the photos,
the pictures composed of dried flowers that you made in Spain: 
 a seahorse, a goldfish, two lovers, 
a death mask for Day of the Dead.

Now this book is a relic of your passage, 
the touch of your fingers
preserved one hundred times over:

I’m thinking I will enclose Rayuela 
inside a cedar box sealed with copper nails,
to add to my reliquary of your touch:   
pens found  when we cleaned out your car,
and the sun-faded Topo Chico bottle found in your garden.

Our last photograph of you shows those beautiful hands
sewing buttons on a red hoodie.

What will you do, now that your fingers fill a universe?


*Spanish edition of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch