Back to the same things (Vuelta a las cosas)

Here is another of my Dad’s deep examinations of the mundane, how things work, their place in life and what they mean to us.  From his book Under the shadow (Sombrabajo).

Back to the same things (Vuelta a las cosas)

We always return somehow to where

things suggested their

vocation to be permanent,

to be, to be there, to show

as men leave their footprint, that they make up

nature’s laboratory

where the magic chisel of the overpowering lustre

sculpts in our memory what we then call simply

“the remembrance of things”.

There are many ways to return

even by forgetting one’s path and directions.

It is perhaps enough to find an image that we capture

to feel again the hasty rhythm of one’s pulse

which was there during the primal knowledge

of our beloved things and the others, those sad things

that fed the ashes

never extinguished from the usual melancholy

of the daily urgencies.