THE HYPOTHESES OF NO ONE Poem by Juan Manuel Roca

The being of man lies on the other side of the curtain.
Simone Weil
It could be the wind.
The blank page. It could be.
It could be the one who's coming
Washed away by the rain.
Now I recall a sightless man
One sweet Freiburg afternoon.
He moved alone through the snow
With a beatific smile
And stick white as the snowflakes.
He walked close by not seeing me:
I was his No One,
A ghost in this luminous realm.
It might happen that we are
The blind of No One.
No One might perhaps be the wind
Beating open windows without musical strains
To make us speak in the language of dreams.
It could be the one who left
Forever a coat abandoned
On a hanger in the café,
A coat like a banner of emptiness
That disappears one day, like its owner.
It could be the one that never was,
The one that will never be,
The one who tired of having been.
Maybe in the land of the disappeared,
The only apparition that we call a ghost,
Is the one that sets a-rattle
The stairs in the night
Or knocks over a frying pan in the kitchen,
The one who moves around the cutlery
Which we then fail to find,
The thief of distant places.
He could be the traveller of himself,
The nomad of his own person.
He's worked at jobs and the timing's been wrong:
He trails papers in the deserted street,
Carrying newspapers out of date
Across the city from side to side,
Bringing to the centre an extramural tang,
Ripping up the posters of yesterday's films,
He makes the trains leave
By ringing only one bell.
It could be the wind.
The blank page. It could be.