It took me forty years to reach the Pacific.
During that voyage to the west,
to those waters, like foam choosing
to get to the planet,
I opened doors into weird scenes,
where sometimes someone shouted and others
the whole theatre remained in silence.
They were hundreds of rooms those I crossed
before arriving at the Pacific
I met the panic of living
and the phobia of dying,
two twin brothers.
I savored millions of gestures, grimaces, rictuses.
In the neighborhoods I heard amalgamams of laughters,
weepings and whinings, and many more
remained in that foreign heaven
to which one offers his back.
I stand before the site that gave name to blue,
in front of the place where the heavy color
swings between two lands.
I am motionless right at the bank
like the stone a hand throws
so that another hand, invisible, stops it.
Like that going out into the euphoria of the sun
from the complexities of an underground world,
him but a shadow under the extended noon .
Because I'm also that man.
He who, in a landscape of mirrors,
is brought back to his only image
by the waves' reflection,
to live –then and never before-
the instant where everything ends and is over:
it is the jigsaw puzzle being set.
The sun, the scarce grass, the air that is also blue
and the precise stains of the rocks' black
are finally in place.
This is the place where one knows
that raising a handful of the volatile surface
is to scratch the glass of the sandglass.
Where it is understood that these swift
water constructions,
those vertiginous silver ties going up
and soon sink in the very deep,
are the thinking sea
and that those dark birds –that suddenly soar there-
are its best notions,
those forever leaving.
I am in front of the Pacific
like a man before the fire.