CHARACTERS IN A CHILDHOOD LANDSCAPE Comments

In the manner of Bohumil Hrabal
If dreams could take me to the old roles of childhood,
if they gave me back the still odour of the toys on the patio
and if they made an inebriated sobbing
to number in the flesh the trace of every wound,
I would go back, with the oil of this sky,
the oil of this burnt season,
to inhabit the place of sadness in the house's furniture,
it would simmer the crafts of love, of death, of cold,
it would open the windows to let in the barking of dogs
and to avert the returning voices.

If dreams could take me to Budapest
in the rails of the train
I would find the castaway poet among stone and iron.
If the leisure of vigils
could take me to Kathmandu or Babylon, the profane,
then I would ask myself about the days of my first love,
full of suns and a smell of cereal,
and polaroid faces stopped in the wind.

Today dreams do not take me to Istanbul, nor to Morocco
and I don't see the sacked house of my days,
nor Mark Twain, nor Tom Sawyer walking in my music.
Where have those days gone?
Where the family banquets and the uncle charging for his sadness?
Where the goals in the stadium
and the sepia girl in the hanging portrait?

Dreams forecast the fall of burnt angels,
the return of the shipwrecked, the dryness of a new love.
Everything is so strange here
that I wonder whether I've arrived under the wrong rain.

I would exchange my terror, my misfortunes, each in turn,
for a day of return to the first Christmas,
for not having to say to the colours
that on a faraway day Turner and Chagall died.
I would exchange my secrets for not having to tell the women I loved,
who live in my words without me knowing about it.

But they do not wait in Budapest or Babylon,
nor in Istanbul or Morocco.
Those faces do not fit into dreams.
Childhood flees with the last plagues.
The football deflates in the ruins of the house
and I wear again the dirty suit of the same forebodings.

Childhood is gone and I never knew
where the Central Park ducks fly to in winter
or if life is to sit keeping watch in the rye
or to go into a cave to be alone with Becky Thatcher.
I did not know if to live
is to to walk barefoot in the open by the Mississippi.
Or to go with my grandfather to watch planes take off in Santa Marta.
My childhood is gone and I did not re-watch the Millennium Falcon
fleeing with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Princess Leia.

Out of so many trades the most difficult is to understand
that the world is just a house of stray gods.
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