This city that you have lived in for all of thirty years,
that gave you from the very first its elements, archetypes
of mountain-line and sea-line, salt water and sandstone;
that granted through a forest deep in pine, with its bright
drifts of stars,
what you first knew of earth and sky, would ever know of love...
This city on a peninsula, between the mountain
and the sea,
that in the decay of its greying wind, its monotonies of rain,
that through its endemic vacancy, the solitudes of its lives,
of its great dualities, divided peoples, darkening of the future,
gave you early on, over and over, a very clear idea of hell...
Knowing there was a light in it, that could
not be disowned,
knowing there was a crime in it that could never be denied,
you were always leaving, for years were always returning,
torn between its cloud-light, pine-light, the serene nihilism
of its skies,
and its unending, all-negating, word-exhausting human cries.
For years you’ve walked a place, through
a peninsula of light,
passing through days and lives that are nothing but their pain.
For years you’ve lived divided, darkened by the same divisions,
have lived so long with these extremes torturing each other,
tearing you apart,
that a city can now start, can finally speak through you
Of that bleakness like no other in its
wind and blander lives,
of the beauty that is seasonal in its big-clouded winters,
of this city of your origins, this city where you’ll surely end,
and of the life it gave you, that, for the first time now
lives joined in you, is life itself: painful, incomparable.
