After the Snow Storm

We write after we suffer.  I see a song with brown Bahamian symbols and Rastafarian colors and flavors but I don’t understand the idea of the artist.  I spend my days and nights thinking about the elusive quality of the writer who, much like the painter learns to describe the minutia of life in a high definition palette of words and blood.  Passion and red go together the same as the story that made me happy and depressive; that story about the bull and the fighter when the fighter lost by barely winning.  The same story continued in my past when the bike rider never did catch up to the front runners while trying harder and harder.  He fell behind and even more so because his effort could not matter more than each second that went by with the wind in that cold mountain.  So we write to express what the painter feels and although the systems are different and the streets full of wandering comics trying to find a syllable and a period of insufferable finality, the goal is the same: to live through the abstract creation of a reality based on art.  Art, after all, is just what the artists understand feelings should look like or sound like or be.

When you are on the edge

The summer has come with tan lines and young women, it is a feeling of beauty and impassioned claims of water filling the minds and ears of the poet.  Since the law ended and little remains unsaid there is a subtle mystery in the humid air of the beach, it is a mystery of sand and silence.  The question in his mind is the same as the one in his heart.  Will she ever be again the one to bring those cold useless thrills of passion.  Will she ever be again the inspiration to the lips that kissed her many times while she slept on top of the four and five dimes of pixelated madness.  Will she come back to the place where she belongs, where the songs remind her of the lights she wants to light up and imagine with gratitude and rare admiration.  These questions fly over the sea of caution where the poet has sunk his boat of hope and is waiting with a principled pen and a blue fishing rod stepping on his warm and very public happiness.  There are some summers that make me want to live, like this one, when you are on the edge, looking down at the supernatural sentiment of uniqueness that lies in this earth, where as always she reigns with the smile and the silhouette of energy and greatness.

About a Song

An unforgettable “trobador cubano” wrote like a miracle:

De que callada manera se me adentra usted sonriendo

Como si fuera la primavera, yo muriendo, yo muriendo

Quien le dijo que yo era risa siempre nunca llanto

Como si fuera la primavera no soy tanto

I tried to translate them, explain them and even draw them on a sad piece of paper but nothing worked.  I accepted the fact that I would never be able to fully communicate the feeling behind these lines to the person I loved at the time.  The song that carries these lines, like many poems of my youth, ended up buried and forgotten in my memory for the best part of twenty years until one night not long ago it reappeared inside a train car in Berlin.  What strange twist of fate put me inside a train in Berlin of all places where the music system was playing the song I will never know.  Abruptly I went back in time, much like Proust and his “madelaine”; hearing those lines I could only think of one person from my past, the same person with the dark eyes of emotion, the one I know understands them.  The heart is a strange friend because it doesn’t let us lie to ourselves but it lets us lie to others.  The places where the lines are sung and read remain vast in the world and the poet should know that there are people like this humble writer who are still in love with these few words and that there are still women who are worthy of them, who become them, who fill the spaces between them and who give meaning to their beautiful gathering.