LANDSCAPE

For most people, the world is a mess. Still, for poets and dreamers like me, it is simply beautiful . You takes no more than a few steps before you come across an unimaginable rainbow of sensations and lose yourself in an infinite collection of marvels thrown together in random combinations: an almond tree intertwines its crowded branches with a Masai hut, and thick blocks of baked mud and dung hang from its branches; a bird with butterfly wings floats above the hot air and above the white smoke that spews from a carriage in flames, burning through the street charred by the stifling sun; a sun that shines only in the portion of the city just mentioned because the rest of the city is engulfed in the densest of darknesses, swallowed up in a geological hole that might have been nonexistent for millions of years. The sky above my head is purple, and within it something slippery and fast moves as if swimming among the rarefied gases, playing with clouds of iodine and ammonia. Below, above the stone pavement and metallic remains of some moving sidewalk that I have never known, on foot through a quagmire of decaying organic tissues that had once represented one or more human bodies, I stand, watching and admiring all these extraordinary and changing things, with no regrets or fears. I know everything. I know about the failed experiment and about the ongoing back and forth of time and matter, but at this moment, one both eternal and ephemeral, nothing can take rob me of the absolute certainty of enjoying this atemporal landscape, asymmetric and anachronistic, unique and unrepeatable. And that fills me with joy.

Twenty short trips through time -- Axxón 167, October, 2006 - Traducido por Daniel W. Koon