Santiago, holy city
1940 sprinkled his pain
In slow pinches
Like charred sugar
I lived with the sisters
Lihn Diaz Parra and their peers
Had not yet read me
At night under the burning sheets
I’d light a dirty lamp
And gave in to her ideas
She had recovered
In a macabre enterprise
Every gram of my life
And captured the music
That slept in my consciousness
I could only hear her waltzes
Her dancer’s whispers
Her icy soft words
She was all the noise
That was missing from my boredom
All the words with the smell of earth
That weighed recalcitrant
On my cottony nights
Standing before the ocean
My family black cloud
Passed by like an omen
And Europe attracted me
Like a rotten orange