This journey starts with a letter I never managed to write Poem by Chus Pato

This journey starts with a letter I never managed to write. My shadow waited for some pharaoh to emerge from stone and expected to agree on a dialogue with you. In all, no directive from History would reach me, I'd already be on the far side of the abyss, as abstraction and difference

and return again and again to the figure of the muselmann in the camps

to that double exclusion, from the animal and from the logos

it's a gaze without borders

even though the body cedes to death, it resists when reason is exhausted

it means that the heart must weigh the same as—or a bit less than—the plume of Osiris

*

at night, the pallor and relief of the white clover flower or trifolium repens make the fields visible, perforate the fields.

Of this scene, I'll just tell you:
in the vestibule, wide and bright after the renovations, I introduced María, Ana, Marta and Iria to Paco; the women walked toward us from the toilets. For a moment it was like the photo of my mother and her friends in 1952: they were intelligence and beauty and the possibility or impossibility of reproduction of the species. They appeared again to me, fleetingly, eternal.