Personal data

Personal data

For Lily and Jorge Soto Mardones

My homeland is a foreign country, in the South,
where a part of me lives
and an image survives.
Some time ago, the country was invaded
by outside forces
that I still feel coming in the night
to settle again in my nightmares.
I also live in a foreign country
where I dedicate myself
to innocent and useless tasks,
and where I will surely die
at the indicated hour,
as tends to happen to people
in what they call their own country
or their foreign country, since there are nothing
but longer or shorter distances from border to border,
with dividing lines that one draws oneself.
Sometimes I remember the country where I was born
and I see, as always,
successive ghosts
and I am one more among them, for a time
that seems very long and very fast,
now reduced to simple light years in the memory
of an afternoon in the park,
a conversation in a bar or on the corner
of any old street
crossed over by the shadows of birds,
indecipherable voices.