Jorge Galán
translated from the Spanish by Janet Hendrickson
That year, we knew the sky existed because we believed in the storm, but we never saw the sky.
Shut in from morning until night, we couldn’t stop talking about what we’d do after.
The sea hanging from our tongues. Extinct horses went up and down the hills we claimed to know.
After a while, the wind changed, it went from west to east and didn’t stop, the street filled with rooks and wild dogs, and the light became a cliff at day’s end.
And we were each afraid, afraid of the noise of the neighbors and the absence of noise, of the huge tail of the rat descending from the roof, of the fighting of the rooks outsideafraid of the children’s insistent question, which was always the same, and afraid of memory, since we had started to confuse the old days with what we imagined lie ahead and soon, we no longer knew whether life was just a wish.
We lived a day that went beyond its limits like a train longer than the city where it stops.
That year, we survived for seven hundred days.
Thousands of hours of cold for a single night.
