HE FINISHES organizing his books, devastated by those intense poems that depict a beauty he cannot participate in. He keeps trying to adapt them to his own life, keeps imagining his own poem, the poem he should write as an apology or homage or indictment. He remembers when he thought he could affect other people with his poems: he thought he could be loved, be accepted, be included. It would have been easier to be disillusioned by poetry, to forget about poetry, than to accept, as Gonzalo did, that he’d failed. It would have been better to blame poetry, but it would have been a lie, because there are those poems he has just read, poems that prove poetry is good for something, that words can wound, throb, cure, console,…
