A chord

Ignacio Escañuela Romana

Perhaps there is an unknown chord, the language with which everything was created. Perhaps if you could touch it, the spheres would move as you wish in that moment. It is possible that we have forgotten this poetry and this primordial language. But it is likely that they do not belong to us, that they are incomprehensible to man, that we cannot reach them, that we compose everything in our own image and likeness, with the virtues at our disposal and the vices that haunt us. Khayyam’s Heaven and Hell.

But sometimes I have glimpsed it in some poems and some songs. I have looked up to the sky and listened to it, without understanding it, like a music of beauty. In some eyes, even when they are hidden, and in the wind, when it blows from the north, but also from the west and the east, raising waves of moisture or dust. When the sun shines and the cicada plays, but also when the snow covered my shoulders and I saw the stars on a clear northern night, they and I alone, in an eternal dialogue that frightened me to the core. A glance, in the half-light that enveloped us, the first touch, soft and deliberate, the skin. The kiss that I have never been able to understand, that comes back to me on sleepless mornings, in my memory.

Perhaps, yes, we once knew the chord, the hidden rhapsody, the breath that lifted this universe. Hidden from us who now strive to build worlds that are only equal to us, that do not satisfy us.

Later, I imagine a new time of hope, when I wander through dreams, through an endless «boira» in the closed jungle, waking up to find myself asleep within myself, but in the middle of the universe.

Then I recite, I would like to speak on the tongue, but I know I am only a man. Perhaps I catch a glimpse of mayastatic eternity. Perhaps I hear the distant murmur of the waves that shake the existing. But I fear that as I walk and observe, everything escapes me, absconditus.