Pablo Espinoza Lafuente's «Pacemaker» opens with an achievement so small it is almost painful: "You managed to get up." That is the whole victory, being upright. From there the poem sketches someone holding life together by minimal means, and a speaker who can only remember them as a figure failing to say goodbye. The poem never names the relationship between "you" and "me," or says what the "you" is going through. That silence seems deliberate, so the best approach is to follow what the words themselves reveal.
The title is the first clue. A pacemaker steadies an unreliable heartbeat, yet the word never returns in the poem. What does return, quietly, is *pace*. "Keep things in place" in the second line and "the pace of who retreats" in the fifth nearly rhyme, and they bracket the first stanza: a wish for order at the top, a slow step backward at the bottom. Judging by the imagery, the poem is about rhythm, about a life, or a farewell, that has lost its regular beat. The title names the device that would fix it, and the poem shows only the irregularity.
The first stanza is built from a chain of participles: "willing," "forgetting," "trying." None of them completes anything, and the action hangs in suspension. The details are chilling in their efficiency. People are forgotten "with the speed of a greeting," as if forgetting were as automatic as saying hello. The smile is "suitable," chosen like clothing for an occasion, not felt. Then the stanza ends on a bare, abrupt verb, "encroach," followed immediately by "the pace of who retreats." The figure advances and withdraws in the same breath, and that contradiction captures someone present in the room but already pulling away.
The second stanza moves inward. What mattered most "was told in undertone," in a passive construction with no clear speaker and no clear listener. Then comes the mirror: "it was enough to stare," and the stare is "your own way not to find a thing." Looking becomes a method of avoiding. The phrase "it was enough" has the flatness of resignation, as if wanting more had long since been given up. This stanza also has no closing punctuation, so it trails off the way the person it describes seems to.
Then the poem turns on a small pivot. "For you" becomes "For me," a parallel that sets two perspectives side by side. The speaker no longer guesses at the other person's inner life and instead offers a memory. It is not a face or a voice but a "silhouette," an outline with the details missing. This silhouette is "limping," which finally gives the title its physical form, a broken pace made visible. It stands at an airport, a place built for departures, and "behind the neighbors' parade," at the margin of a public spectacle, unnoticed by the crowd. The last line says that the goodbye is a "vain endeavor," so the word that closes the poem is the very thing that never happens.
There is no rhyme scheme and no regular meter. The poem is free verse, with lines of uneven length that stumble a little, which suits its subject. The stanzas shrink from five lines to four to three, as though the figure were receding and the poem running out of room to hold it. The English also has an unusual quality in places: "on the airport," "the pace of who retreats." These slightly off-kilter phrasings add to the sense of a memory that does not sit comfortably.
The poem matters because it refuses melodrama. It never explains, accuses, or consoles. A few precise images, the mirror, the airport, the parade, carry all the feeling, and the title quietly reframes everything as a question of rhythm and care. Its central idea is that some farewells are never completed, and that memory keeps a person fixed in the middle of the gesture. By the end, the speaker's own goodbye seems as unfinished as the silhouette's, and the poem itself becomes the attempt.