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‘el techo de la ballena’   Time to be climbing out of time as the wild city rates it, receding from the cable car rising from Caracas into the marriage of leaf and mist: a great ship composed of greying droplets is docking at the summit of Avila and Argelia and I must get there before its rain-crew disembark and birdsong resiles into its respective throats   But first the child in a Cuban forage cap must cry ‘no amo caer’ and her mother must laugh, whether we fall or not, and each tree beneath our swaying feet must fill a bell-tower built from fog with its shaking carillon of hangdog leaves which dream of becoming second-hand books laid on the pavement in the Parque Central: World Poetry for Dummies, La Prisión de la Imaginación   We leap from the cradle and into the haze, pass among the sellers of arepas and melocotón along the path stretched like a sagging clothesline between the sweating cold palms of the fog past the dogs that guard these heights from the piratical stars, the thieving galaxies We pass by the blind dejected telescopes and approach the colossal, mostly-obscured, mist-broken column of the Humboldt Hotel   It’s only as we stand beneath the topless trees pissing down their panicking legs, waiting for the piano bar to open, that I realise an invisible horse has been following me for some time – translucent notes hanging from its eyelashes betray its presence, truculent and shy as always, summoned by helados and bullets wrapped in handkerchieves, by the thighs of mangoes   And it’s only as the mist clears and unclears like a sea rendering up its depths, its dead, its patient staring inhabitants, and the horse and Argelia and I drink beer in the English Bar, even though we’re so cold and the bar is not even sub-mock-tudor, that I understand the world is the wrong way up, that mountaintops protrude into Lethe and that we are in the grip of a devilfish   As if to confirm this conclusion a host of devilbirds flash their unknown yellow tails in Vs and display the nerve-coloured blue of their breasts and begin to converse in a cluttering language only sailors of these dimensions could have devised to be understood by those beings eager to pass among the stars without questions Of course it is already dark as a horse and we look down upon the city