Machined

At noon, I hung out a machine-made load of linen. It's pleasant to hang it up, fragrant and wet, fresh and carnal, refined not by the pieces but by their use, like laundry after an illness, as if hanging sheets and pillowcases had been hung between them the nights spent, and hanging the T-shirt had been hung the evening I wore them for a sound hike the other day in the mountains, not far away because the dog has grown old and can't keep up.

Now in the afternoon a calm garbí blows and it is a pleasure to see the sheets swell and wave like the skirts of a silent dance – or not so silent, because the same wind that animates them then stirs the yellowish leaves of the elm, about to fall off, like thousands of drooping ears and thousands of whispered conversations vibrate that make the music of a sea of leaves about to fall.

The October sun is low, the white is not dazzling, it is stimulating to look at the unbuttoned jeans with the fly open, standing and at the same time stretched out on the back sheet, and, next to it, the short-sleeved shirt standing vertically without arms, and four socks that point, and some underwear, and some underwear.

There are clothespins stuck into the clothesline that are left over, and there I imagine red silk garments hanging, wine-proof party dresses, but they are not there, and they give me an effect of spiritual fullness, those emptinesses, like this article that leads nowhere, like life, and today I am reading it, which for me is a compliment because the best books are never finished, there is no need to finish them because they do not depend on the plot, the plot is the trap, as articles usually are, which convince with the same arguments that in another newspaper will convince you of the opposite, and by canceling each other out they run afoul.

I take advantage of the free needles to hang, word by word, some verses that these days I can't get out of my head, they are from a Shakespeare play that, like all of his, is enough to try, and that now, seeing the empty clothes that will dress me and my bed in a few days,Macbethwho speak of an ancient Scotland: "Ah, poor homeland! Almost afraid to recognize itself. It cannot be called our mother, but our grave."

For days the memory of these verses seemed to be looking for an actor to embody them, so, clean and dry, I take them down and leave them here.