the fires burn
brighter on the sunny
side of hell

now thare's a sight worth seein'

I'm
listening
to
you
breathe
turquoise
river
relief
with
sentimental
razors
dipped
in
Cleopatra's
folly

white sheets of
paper to get dressed up
in heaven

carry on without a(b)solution

exposed bone etching
immaculate revisions
back lit freezer burn

La Francesa

An intelligent woman.
A beautiful woman.
Knew all the variants, all the possibilities.
Reader of Duchamp's aphorisms and the stories
of Defoe.
In general possessing an enviable self-control,
Except when she got depressed and got drunk,
Something that could last two or three days,
A succession of Bordeaux and Valium
That would give you goosebumps.
Then she'd usually tell you what happened to her
Between the ages of 15 and 18.
A pornographic horror movie,
Naked bodies and business deals that skirted the law,
A vocational actress and at the same time a girl with
strange strokes of greed.
I met her when she'd just turned 25,
In a tranquil period.
I suppose she feared old age and death.
Old age for her was thirty,
The Thirty Years' War,
Christ's thirty years when he started to preach,
An age like any other, I told her when we dined
By candlelight
Pondering the flow of the planet's most literary river.
But for us prestige lay elsewhere,
In bands possessed by slowness, in gestures
Exquisitely slow
From dishevelment
In dark beds,
In the geometric mutliplication of empty shop windows
And in the grave of reality,
Our absolute,
Our Voltaire,
Our philosophy of bedroom and boudoir.
Like I said, an intelligent girl,
With the rare virtue of foresight
(Rare for us Latin Americans)
So common in her country,
In which even the assassins have bankbooks
And she wasn't going to be any less,
A bankbook and a photo of Tristan Cabral,
Nostalgia for the unlived,
While that prestigious river trailed a dying sun
And down her cheeks rolled seemingly gratuitous tears.
I don't want to die, she whispered while escaping
In the shrewd darkness of the bedroom,
And I didn't know what to say,
I really didn't know what to say,
Except to caress her and support her while she moved
Up and down like life,
Up and down like the poets of France,
Innocent and punished,
Until she returned to Planet Earth
And from her lips sprouted
Passages from her adolescence that filled our bedroom
on the spot
With copies crying on metro escalators
With copies making love to two guys at once
While rain was falling outside
Over garbage bags and over abandoned pistols
In the garbage bags,
Rain that washes everything
Except for memory and reason.
Dresses, leather jackets, Italian boots, lingerie to
drive you mad,
To drive her mad,
They appeared and disappeared in our phosphorescent,
throbbing bedroom,
And quick strokes of other less intimate adventures
Flashed in her wounded eyes like fireflies.
A love that wasn't going to last long
But that by dessert would have become unforgettable.
That's what she said,
Seated by the window,
Her face suspended in time,
Her lips: a statue's lips.
An unforgettable love
Beneath the rain,
Beneath the sky bristling with antennas in which
17th century coffers coexist
With the shit of 20th century pigeons.
And in the middle
All the inextinguishable capacity to inflict pain,
Undefeated through years,
Undefeated through loves
Unforgettable.
Yes, that's what she said.
An unforgettable love
And brief,
Like a hurricane?
No, a love brief as the sigh of a guillotined head,
The head of a king or Breton count,
Brief like beauty,
Absolute beauty,
That which contains all the world's majesty and misery
And which is only visible to those who love.

-Roberto Bolano
The Romantic Dogs