Another man gets away

.

.

Another man gets away,

a man is always getting away, as far from the shore

as a shipwreck survivor adrift on his raft,

under the umbrella he improvised in his hunger to survive

a sea that devours him from within and without.

The man that gets away,

is forever gathering up his gear,

the diminutive poetry that shapes his life,

the gravity of the mystery that bears him to that remoteness

from which he surveys the receding shore,

a distance beyond any possible return by the currents.

The choppy waters, a mouth that swallows his form and shadow,

make of a man a sand dune that builds up and is submerged.

He and the shoreline never meet: a man who always leaves

and a shore that seems to remain when in reality it withdraws

phantasmagorically, like a huge frigate under a monarch’s command.

The man, although loving the will to live more than life itself,

realizes that the gates through which he can start his new world,

the island he observes and that observes him,

will likewise be a drop of water from the sea,

a fleeting slap of light beneath the waves.

.

© David Lago-Gonzalez, 1975.

© Kurt Findensein, translation, 2008.