Joan Margarit

Once destroyed, the past is what we always
try to rebuild, like an old country house.
But no one lives there. There is not even the liturgy
that the motorway has, early in the morning.
I understand very little now about those days.
What endures are the consequences. Hard at times.
A dolls’ house and the warmth
that hid your loneliness.
Ugly wounds under white bandages.
I walk beneath flawless moons
that shone on your childhood,
I hear a catalogue of stories to send you to sleep.
I think of the dignity of that girl
relinquishing in favour of her sister—so much weaker—
her place as princess. There are no mistakes
that can be made without our realising
as remote as the ones we make over children.
If you don’t know which love I am
and if I don’t know which love you are
then we must have lost our guiding star.
Although it is many years since I have known anything
of your fears, your hopes
when you find yourself alone in a hotel bedroom,
and I shall never know which of my faces
you will one day choose to remember me by,
I feel, suddenly, that we have survived,
without caresses, an abandonment.