argentina

Argentina, you are sneaky
you make no claims, no promises, and then swirl yourself like smoke through my hair
you chase your own shadows, refuse to believe what you see in the mirror, gather your histories about you like loose threads and keep only those that slip over your curves and shine in the light of the moon.

Argentina, you close your doors and raise your voice in celebration, welcome in anyone that doesn't stand at the threshold fidgeting and waiting to be invited in. you stare back. you relax your eyes. believe in promises that have no past or future only now now now.

Argentina i have seen you stretch your cat back at the stroke of midnight, slip on masks of beauty and fireworks, and dissolve into the mists of dawn. you slow me down, remind me to breathe. my eyes lose focus in your presence and my body becomes light. i forget that i am an animal and remember that i can walk through walls, if only i believe it to be true.
Argentina i believe in you

in the way the world is endless in both its dramatic beauty and its apathetic cruelty, in the fierceness of family, in the way you do not hide in doubts and defeat, but disguise yourself in the realization that mysteries are the seeds of dreams.
and you laugh.
how you love to laugh.
without explanations or accusations, you shake your head at the craziness of this life and smile that quiet confident smile that is yours alone. You laugh and you birth circuses with that laughter, with your dark eyes and unswerving ways, the world becomes draped in color, in vastness, until your jaw-dropping heart-leaping magic fades like a backdrop, allowing you to go about your slow cyclical days.

you are an idea and thus, undefeatable, undeniable, immortal.
you are a pheonix, a promise, the spaces between drops of water, the slow breath of deep sleep where dreams find flight.
you are unassuming, my Argentina, seething beneath the surface. i am royalty in your presence. i embrace my everyday ordinary in your presence and my walls wash away.

i am covered in butterflies, Argentina.  you cover me in butterflies.
their irridescent smudges glimpsing out from the slow unfolding of wings, painting my honeyed heels with the slow grace of timelessness and i am wet with intrigue and the feeling that i can never get close enough.

you are amazing. i am forever reaching toward you but never actually imagine holding you in my grasp. I wonder what it would be like if you fell into my palm.
but you do not fall. even when you feel gravity tugging at you with its obsessive illusions, you rise, you rise, you imperceptibly rise.

Argentina, this is sad.
a world full of watchers and waiters.
but aren't you doing the same thing?
no.
you are too immersed in yourself. you are brimming with life. you have torn the posters down and discarded the bulging cracks in the walls, placed buckets under ceiling leaks, changed out of your slick black mustaches and high heels and into something you can move in and that's exactly what you are doing, with nobody watching. you are a hidden waterfall with a crystalline pool, an eden that enjoys the solitude, spacious enough that we all have room to close our eyes and dream. and where patience is the art of calmly waiting, you are beyond patience, because you do not wait.
you simply acknowledge that the world is not ready yet and go about your business.

Argentina this is ridiculous. I am in love with you and i can allow myself to be, fully, fearlessly, only because i do not hope that you will love me back.
and yet, you are slow. so imperceptible i can barely see you move, gliding behind with your outdated fashions and cheap white bread, your cultish obsession with butchered meat, red raw blackened or bleeding, and your god that is a lost promise.
and so you must believe in yourself and build your gods from the scraps of flags and stacked glass liters, the scattered remains of joyous forgetfullness. your new god is patched and plastic and surprises you with victories. he flies into torn nets and whispers 'si se puede' without looking back.

and yet, you seem familiar. a land of immigrants that we all defend furiously because we can no longer go home.

with your bruised fruit and midnight scavengers
pirate stripes and ivy balconies,
street corner accordians and men dressed to fit their roles,
cemetery steeples and unsmiling seduction,
you are fleeting.
i wonder what i ever loved about you, if only the way you never sit still, never nestled into the curve of my calm, your feathered body looking for a place to warm your wings. but i must have, for i remember the words, over and over like a mantra in my mind and i think of you in snapshots, wet after a days rain when in our secret joy to be comfortable again within all of our skins, we fumbled over simple words, the chipped paint of a white veil slowly circling itself through pigeons and heavy memories, a pale hand delicately draped on a doorknob and the cobwebbed threads that held them together.

they are all quiet moments when i convinced myself that you are beautiful.
when you looked at me and took a step back, gave me enough solitude to reinvent you, like we all do, the secret to eternal love.