Habit, Old Habit: The Siesta (Ii) Poem by Raquel Angel Nagler

O l d h a b i t : t h e s i e s t a (II)

In the market of my little days
My drum plays, like a vendor of rituals,
With fingers used for so long
That I can’t remember the silences they came from.

* * *

My crocodiles lie beneath the soft mud,
In silent rows of habit:
A domestic shield against the carnivorous flies:
The tears of little days.

* * *

Sometimes
In the silent movie of the soul
I see in slow motion
My years: deaf, blind, ready for nothing,
Floating on the tiny parachute of habit.

* * *

For each sea there is a river
And a solitary man
Building dikes of minute certainties
To silence the mad salt in his mouth.

* * *

Maybe habit is only a look:
The gaze of a clement tyrant
That keeps drawing a pond of water-lilies
Around my shipwrecked eyes.