Pavilion of Nothingness

I join the screw

posing questions in the wall,

a lackluster sound

color covered with a blanket.

But I falter and momentarily

blind, I can barely feel myself.

All at once, I call to mind,

with my fingernails I tunnel

a tokonoma in the wall.

I need a tiny hollow,

it’s there I go diminishing

to reappear anew,

to touch myself and set my forehead in its place.

A tiny hollow in the wall.

Multiplier of weariness 

the café I’m sitting in,

the insistent daiquiri

returning like a face of no use

for death, for springtime.

With my hands I trace the length

of a lapel that feels cold to me.

I wait for no one and I insist

on someone’s pressing arrival.

All at once, with my fingernail

I draw a tiny crevice on the table.

There it is, the tokonoma, the hollow,

I’m in company unrivaled,

a corner conversation in Alexandria.

We’re together in a round

of skaters through the Prado.

He was a child who inhaled

all the tenacious dew from the sky,

even then with the hollow, like a cat

that circles the whole body

with a silence full of flickerings.

Within reach of what surrounds us,

and close to our body,

the stubborn notion that says our soul

and its enwraptment fit

inside a tiny hollow in the wall

or on a tissue paper scratched with a fingernail.

I’m diminishing

I’m a point that disappears and returns

and a fit full-length inside the tokonoma.

I make myself invisible

and on the verso I recover my body

swimming at the beach,

encircled by bachelors of art with banners of snow,

mathematicians and baseball players

describing sapodilla ice cream.

The hollow is smaller than a deck of cards

and it can be as big as the sky,

but we can shape it with our fingernail

along the brim of a coffee cup

or in the sky that falls beside our shoulder.

The beginning is united with the tokonoma,

in the hollow a kangaroo can hide

without forfeit of its bounding joy.

The apparition of a cave is

mysterious and begins to disentangle its dreadful.

To hide there is to tremble,

the hunter’s horns resound

in the frozen forest.

But the hollow is soothing,

we can lure it with a thread

and usher it in to insignificance.

I scrape the wall with a fingernail,

slivers of lime crumble down

as though they were shards

from the celestial tortoise shell.

Is the barrenness in the hollow

the first and final path?

I fall asleep, in the tokonoma

the other still walking is the one I evaporate.