Out of tobbaco, coffee, wine,
              they appear at the edge of night
              like those voices you hear singing
              somewhere far down the street,
              but you cannot recognize the song.
               Julio Cortazar “Los Amigos”

it came to me in a a dream that we have all gathered together again
at the long wooden table set up somewhere
in the middle of nowhere in the mountains
at the white wooden table covered with a chequered table-cloth
with red embroideres
we are sitting silent on a plateau surrounded with tall vegetation

focusing on the transparent lemon blossoms
floating around in the dreary May sky and
falling down
into our glasses and sticking onto the mud on our uniforms sliding
down the frozen barrels of our rifles dissapearing in the grass
among it’s shiny sharp blades wrapping around our boots
several thousand years old. some of us
drink pure wine while I drink it mixed
with bubbling water pregnant with minerals
those quartz crystals of roaring waterfalls
some pour ordinary water into wine; there is a jug on the table
that we fill at the well brimming with water as crystal
as the air around us so vacant that through it I can see the cracks
in the snow
melting as the furthest of those glassy blak mountain tops.
from here it is

perfectly clear that the Earth is round. the salty wind
that rose from the sea overnight tiptoes across its flat surface
passing through invisible labyrinths
in an attempt to surprise the German shepherd
asleep in the shadow of the only tree that grows on this plain
(none of us is worried too much about the enemy dogs.)

I light up a cigarette and throw the match into the grass filling my lungs with smoke
so powerful that it blurs my eyesight.

we’re sitting silent sensing the lava of future volcanoes churning
somewhere deep down bellow our feet
- the soil is born again having spent the entire winter locked under the snow
rolling in its sleep and sucking on dead organisms
renewing itself and sprouting roots – hardening and widening,
bearing bitter, coloured sprouts.

we sit there placidly watching the fruits of the mountain lemon tree ripening.
the food on the table is modest as it always has been:
a few loaves of bread, thirty hard boiled eggs. there are the maps
(maps of some other far regions) plus seven

Motorola radios and five to six bandages, three infra red night visors, two regular
                                                                                                      binoculars
for daily observation + seven military compasses who point nowhere safe.