We run so much
that the road, at times,
arrives after us.
Life counts our steps
like someone adding up debts.
One appointment,
then another,
one more name on the calendar,
one more urgency
disguised as fate.
We learn early
to seem necessary.
Answer quickly.
Arrive before time.
Do more.
Be seen.
Carry the whole day
without letting
a single cup fall.
Inside,
a little water insists.
It does not shout.
It does not preach.
It promises no salvation.
It runs low,
stubborn,
almost a child.
From it comes this unrest
that pushes us forward,
this small fire
that makes the body long for mornings,
loves, journeys,
a house with more light,
a name kept somewhere
inside the future.
From it comes, too,
the desire to pause.
Even dreams
need to take off their shoes.
The flower smiles
today with its whole mouth.
Tomorrow it gives its color back
to the earth.
Light passes.
Pleasure passes.
Beauty passes
and, because it passes,
wounds more deeply.
Life seduces us
with what will not stay.
Still, we go on.
That is the wonder.
Hope does not learn.
It loses,
trembles,
ages,
shrinks in certain months,
almost goes out
on certain nights.
Then it returns,
without fanfare,
lit inside a crack.
Sometimes hope
is only a crack
that did not close.
I turn the world off
for a moment.
It is not refusal.
It is thirst.
I turn off the machine,
the screen,
the noise,
the obligation to be whole
in every place.
I turn off this hurry
that calls me by name
as if it owned the house.
I want to hear
what is left of me
when no one asks me for anything.
The clock keeps going.
I do not follow.
My hour, now,
wants no hands.
It longs for a porch,
for fruit cut slowly,
for wind moving through the curtain,
for barefoot thought
crossing the room.
The pause does not solve life.
It would be too little
if it did.
The pause opens a clearing
where the days have grown wild..
There, the body reappears.
Breath finds
its old address.
The gaze stops hunting for meaning
and lands.
A wall receives light.
A glass keeps silence.
A memory crosses the house
without making a scene.
Seen this way,
the world does not grow smaller.
It becomes more world.
And I, less busy
defeating time,
begin to inhabit it.
I do not want a life emptied of desire.
Nor that lifeless calm
that mistakes peace
for surrender.
I want to keep wanting.
I just do not want to be consumed
by my own longing.
To dream, yes.
To run, when needed.
To burn, when the fire comes.
To leave, when the wind calls.
But also to know how to stay.
To stay inside the instant
like someone pressing an ear
to the wood of a door
and hearing, on the other side,
life preparing
another season.
Rest is not
the end of the road.
It is a root drinking from the dark.
It is folded wing
before the leap.
It is time, tired of being a fist,
opening its hand.
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