I slipped away at the first light
Of dawn and slept on the ground, a stone
For a pillow. It’s possible to travel
(In your head) from the Belle Epoque to the present
Some things are different, but many things are the same
And there’s more than enough to keep you busy during
the day
And far into the night
I slipped away when no one was looking
And stared at myself in the bathroom mirror
I was a child thinking of death for the first time
My body against the sink to make sure I was still
alive
And this was what I felt
The cold sink against my skin—it was one way of thinking
You could touch someone in the dark and that was enough
“Living” and “touching” were almost the same
Part two was to remember what it felt like afterwards
Sometimes it happens outdoors, on an empty beach
A chill in the air when you step out of the water
Your mother wraps a towel around your naked shoulders
Sometimes it happens in sleep when you fall through a hole
in the sky
And land on the other side
Or step off a train that’s still moving
Once I stared into space and couldn’t come back
From where I had gone and where I had been
And the hands of the clock moved forward but I couldn’t breathe
A boat adrift on the ocean with no land in sight
I can change into another person if you want
It’s enough to see the light come up over the tops of the hills
And the clouds in the distance, the blocks
Of ice cracking like a broken heart, a radio
On the beach in La Paz playing our song.
from Elixir