14 AUGUST 06
Jaime Saenz
THE COACH OF THE DEAD
A long time ago, when I was a child, they tried to teach me things about certain things. But I never managed to grasp the norms of discipline.
One day I was walking through the city and I saw a coach. It caused me great distress. I don't know, now, if it was green or blue or red, but over the course of my life I came to believe it was colorless, that it was simply a coach.
On that day when, as a child, I saw the coach, I was infected with who knows what strange force, what strange presentiments.
It was the coach of the dead, according to the revelation of the epileptic child I encountered years later on a sunny afternoon...
This incident, of course, means little at all, given that the child refers to any passing coach as the "coach of the dead."
The dead, just like the living, can die again.
So the revelation of the epileptic child, on a sunny afternoon.
The dead have the power to die.
The fact of dying deprives no one of the right to die again. Here lies the secret of existence.
This is why the dead have died.
This is also why the dead are, in a sense, precocious.
--from Immanent Visitor Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz
tr. Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander
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