“Look, look: the dead–I do not fear the dead,
I do not pity them. Death shall have no dominion.
It is in our future. 'We are all in our future!'
Let's go! Music! Horses! Lights!”
–Elytis, The Girls, trans. Olga Broumas
Sofia Ortiz, tacto, 2020 (Artist Website)
Watercolor on paper, 31 x 41 cm
as though we are the same age
and meet as our future or past or interim selves
each wearing a dress like a forest whose leaves are photons
I lift my hand, she lifts hers our veins
continuous, interrupted by radiance
my mother on her deathbed yesterday
speaks in one of her alternate languages
we hold photos of a long-ago lake near Szarvas
her black dog and a girl she may or may not remember
remain in their sunlit winter forest, dark cypress marks
the graveyard, swallows strafe bright-lit grasses
all the times we lived meet here, an engine
starts up and then a lamb, bells and their
silence, ploughed field just before the rain