with girls mature at thirteen,
in the immoderate sunsets.
Tremulous veins of a leaf,
rivers traverse you with red water
on the first sketchbook of landscapes
painted by some child’s hand.
You hold wild birds and plants,
drowsy bodiced women
lacing their fingers, placid rafts
to ford the rivers, crab beds
that devour men and animals,
multitudes of black barefoot daughters
crossing your deserts and seasons.
You hold provinces and governments,
empty settlements and distances
with melancholy names of ranches,
indomitable mortal weariness,
frightful summer swamps,
sandbanks, north wind, and skeletons,
fragrances of mint and wormwood,
grocery stores on every corner,
broad courtyards with many breezes.
You hold perverse, submissive plants
with all the favorite poisons
for precise and sudden deaths,
the way large insect cabinets
gather poisonous spiders,
malarial mosquitoes, butterflies.
My country, time and again I am born mute!
Immobile as a tree I have let
your sky bathe me in pink light.
I have seen the plains so bare
left without pastures, unwatered
your plantations and scant gardens.
I have seen blind horses bolt away.
At different windows of your houses,
dazzled and attentive, I have known
inclement storms. I have heard
the cry of the southern screamer and the lapwing,
the cry of the heron and the iguana,
and leading the daily herd,
high and nocturnal, the cry of the cowhand.
I have breathed all your smells:
coolness of jasmine in the February heat,
magnolias, hollyhocks,
perfumes of sticky clock vines
and the fervid smell of skunks.
In arbored villas, nighttime
flight of dark blue birds,
your song of pebbles and coaches
has granted me prolonged childhoods,
dulce de leche and wakeful naps,
stuffed green hummingbirds,
the fountain held aloft by putti,
festive orange lanterns,
and forgotten hammocks from Paraguay.
My country, in a public square I have known
by heart passages from your history.
Beneath the pointing hand
of San Martín, I have impersonated
Indians in the limpid west winds.
I have transformed severe forefathers
with a careful red pencil,
English invasions I dreamed
on rooftops suddenly awash in
boiling oil and hair flying. I have seen
Santa Rosa of Lima unleashing
heavy squalls and worshipping,
on paper lace, hearts and
all the other Rosas full of virtues.
Vast and empty country, indefinite
as a distant land, interrupted
by the slow arrival of trains,
with jubilant waiting on the platforms.
It is in the uncertain dawn when
your invisible gauchos cross
fenced-off fields and gullies,
ponds and tumbledown gates,
that your slow maternal spirit stays
silent as a magpie in the grove.
Your wide river secretly mimics
your candies, your skies
and pink confetti for baptisms.
Equatorial heat and blue ice
in your sierras, scattered stones
like herds of tortoises, like ivy.
You are magnificent and destitute:
with a coldness and restless ardor,
from the Bay of Last Hope
to the Pilcomayo’s welcome waters,
the indolent violence of your lands
recurs with moons or in mountains.
Buenos Aires
Prior to your houses, God loved you.
Alone, imitating the sun, He contemplated you.
Later, men loved you: the navigator
from his ship, the Indian with his bow,
the uncomfortable gentleman in his arcane
portrait, a monocle in his hand,
the one who died without a portrait, pained
to leave no face that would remain.
Long before Solís, before Mendoza,
many imagined you from afar
as they walked along the sand or in processions.
Not knowing you existed they invented you
among vague prairies, they longed for you
without fevers or tyrants or serpents,
with the suns you have today, your evening dew.
Sad the Duke of Wu imagined you
when the black plague drew near.
In many worm-streaked mirrors
he saw your river painted with varnishes.
And among the books of Elephantis, quiet
as the water, Tiberius secretly
saw you on the island of Sicily.
Wrapped in her hair, ecstatic
and determined, Mary the Egyptian
saw you, green as the vanishing oasis.
And the Arab glassmakers in China,
who carried in their uncertain retinas
an insistent meridian light,
saw you in Mohammedan blue.
For eight hundred months, crossing the plains
of India seventeen times with his hosts,
Mahmud of Ghazni in darkest caverns
imagined you with magnolias
and no winds from the southwest
nor whores in sky-blue dress.
With bandstands and tridents, with the rose,
the tree, and the tempestuous story,
Murasaki Shikibu in her lacework
peopled you with a million characters.
Four false dauphins condemned to die
and the tired invalids of Ilmenau
saw you in the water stain,
in a protracted instant, for years.
And in his most terrifying dreams,
among men with reversible heads,
De Quincey saw you in the furniture,
the palm tree, the wooden leaves and flowers.
And I, Silvina Ocampo, in your abstract
presence have seen your possible absence,
I have seen your doors alone endure
with the insistence of dead hands.
Among stones and tin cans and cement,
beneath altered firmaments,
as in a great desert each day’s sun
passes through me and I see how it passes
leaving you exultant trash,
the Alsina Bridge and what remains from before:
the atrocious monument that endures,
your sectional houses, and the dour
nostalgia for gardens gone to waste,
the somber amputated trees
and the back patios, the ladies
greeting the afternoon in rocking chairs,
your tinted doves, your flowers
your candy shops, your smells.
In the Botanical Garden, in Palermo,
around an invalid’s balconies,
in Lezama Park I searched
for plants the lucky shade of green.
Often I didn’t sit
beneath the gum tree signaled
by the public’s hand that applauds
the persecuted dog, the tango, fraud.
There will be no street corner or seamstress,
no landscape painted on a mat,
there will be no burning of trash,
no walls or ceilings with moldings,
two women who love each other like sisters,
no little girl who spits at windows,
a man unlucky in a plaza,
a rose in the turbid Maldonado,
that do not absorb the color of evening
in the red and violet sky ablaze
when the sidewalk peddlers count
their merchandise like lovers.
San Isidro
for my sister Victoria
Villa of San Isidro, in your patient
ravines I will always love
the tides, the sago palms, the tridents,
the mallow, the coffered parasol,
the soothing fan, the checkers game,
the poor kid too, and the green leaf.
Persistently I will love the cedar,
the triangle, the sphere, and the polyhedron,
the elaborate ornament, the arbors,
the quiet-seeming melodies,
a pregnant woman at an upper entrance
crowned with an electric light,
a darkened vestibule with jasmines
sending other gardens through the house,
the sewing and ironing room,
the sugary impure spiderweb,
the orange embroidery and the white lily,
the folded tablecloth in the cupboard.
I will always hear a piano,
Chopin, Ravel, and Schumann in summer,
the magpie singing on a slope,
the wheel rusting on the well,
the purchase of some tree and the statue,
the hope of seeing a will-o’-the-wisp.
Everything at the villas is vegetation.
As the tree claims your affection, so will
the gardener, the flowerpot, the bench,
I myself, the step, the white glove,
the glassy bonfires, the cloud of smoke,
the wind through the silk trees,
the familiar slate roof,
the constancy of the cricket and the cicadas.
After the rakes fall silent,
when your plants seem to grow
entwined by the honeysuckle,
when you wait for everything to dissolve,
the blush of the peach in the baskets
and the day’s suns amid the pastures,
your inhabitants sleep, prisoners
of the tulle mosquito netting,
silent as people at a concert.
No one can escape once awake,
not in the night of the stabbed dog,
nor on the newly tarred road.
No one can escape along the ravines
because each moon paints white shadows.
Privileged some thief, with wings
light as an angel’s, you do not point him out
when he jumps past the grille and the windows,
avoiding stairways and bells.
Nights of the shotgun and the caretaker,
nights that kept the goldfinch awake.
Villas of San Isidro, dazed,
gazing at the sky like an emigrant,
I knew you with the tricycle, the tears,
the whooping cough and the knitted shawl,
with lilac rivers and flat earthworms,
the Sarandí district and its vague gullies,
with a moon and Saturn’s rings
enlarged upon the sullen sky
in the cold and warlike telescope,
with the mysterious light of a stereoscope,
with variations and old hats
hung on the racks, among mirrors,
and with the white birch tree and the araucaria
and the timbo pacara and the arbitrary
duration of the evening fanned
by a slow fluted palm leaf,
in the meticulous contemplation
of the clouds and the pleasure of the rose.
SONNETS FROM THE GARDEN
In memory of my mother
◆◆◆
The Portrait
Faithful to the future memory,
you bequeathed a photograph that still exists.
At the time there was no way your modesty
could know your image’s significance.
Perhaps you didn’t choose the balustrade
where you were leaning in the garden, nor
the posture of your hands together, nor
the look in your eyes
of posing earnest questions. With melancholy,
tenderly distant from your sister,
you foresaw me searching for that day:
patient, you prepared this hidden virtue
that enables you, unmoving, to come
to a pale garden in order to live.
The Mirror
A corridor led me to the ceremonious
mirror of your door. There
you were repeated. The purple
wallflower sometimes held a reflection
of your deliriously ribboned gowns
as you left for the theater. Alone,
like a lost flower, without corolla,
rather like certain unused gloves
in your wardrobe, I felt abandoned.
In your keen nocturnal absence nothing
promised your return, not the magic
mirror waiting for the splendor
of your images, nor the later tragic
silence of that very corridor.
The Hands
Your hands that were sun in winter,
in summer kept the insubstantial
coolness of water. A tender face
would claim their palms, when nights
led you darkened through the rooms
to the garden with trees that loved
your plain purple dresses.
In the crickets’ perpetual song,
and amid gathered wicker chairs,
I remember your two similar hands...
Fragrant from soaps and roses
they detected fevers. Pure and
ageless, they were leaves, wings,
they evoked the fields in the parlors.
The Siesta
On sweltering days when the crickets
sang too much and the jasmine
wilted, your hands closed off
the garden with respectful doors.
The hum of groggy fans
drifted through the house. Mysterious,
peaceful as meticulous nights,
the siesta hours wove fabrics
with infinite botanical activity.
In arbors, in green fountains,
with angelic or satanic eagerness
they invented complex and patient
deaths, infinitesimal worlds,
labyrinths of deepening petals.
The Balcony
In the summer on a balcony in France,
we gazed at the foreign cedars
and a too-blue lake in the distance,
far from ceibo trees and goldfinches.
We liked an emptier country:
There’s not one palm tree here, I would say.
Birdsong doesn’t waken us
with the muddy waters, with the ships!
Oh, I prefer the Río de la Plata!
Faithful to the absence and still ungrateful,
I am a stranger here sometimes:
the balcony is missing now, not palm trees,
the cedars are missing, not the muddy shores.
Oh, how blue was the lake, and there were roses!
The Storm
I remember you on stormy days!
You would open the window and like the tree
proclaim the rain. You revered
the benign appearance of mint
and clover. The earth distended
orange spaces. It was the spontaneous
economic watering, the impregnable
calm. It was the propitio
us day:
with magical linen ribbons
you braided and caged the lavender.
Blank destiny of a cold closet
you gave to such fragrant twigs,
nightgown and summer dress,
thread of soothing sheets.
The Ride
In the garden that afternoon
the carriage bell faded and returned;
I listened the whole time, until the night:
like a memory it saddened me.
It climbed the ravines in the west
by roads I know so well:
carefully you were dazzled.
The past now inhabited that song
of a ringdove accompanying the day.
Voluntarily I was excluded
from the circular ride and I followed
as I follow it still in my absence:
by the river your lilac dress
recedes among the rows of poplar trees.
◆◆◆
Sleepless Palinurus
nudus in ignota, Palinure, iacebis harena.
Aeneid (v. 871)
The waves, the seaweed, the widening wings,
the seashells rent and resonant,
the salt and iodine, the savage storms,
the uncertain dolphins and the chorusing
of sirens weary of their melodies,
will not replace for you the gentle lands
where you used to wander with the steady gait
that distances deep ships unerringly.
Palinurus, your closed and seaward face
keeps the serene night awake.
You naked, lying in that place,
will perpetuate your deaths upon the sand,
and distracted as a stone your hair
and nails will grow among the ivy there.
Epitaph for a Tree
Like a drink of water I gave shade
in summer. My sap captured
the gold of evening and the pale
persistence of the river in the dove.
So inattentive were the glances,
that no man in this world could ever
enumerate my leaves, my songs.
Now my absence occupies much space:
a flight of incessant birds marks
the place where I am missing, which grows larger.
Epitaph for a Trapeze Artist
Here I rest in my pink tights.
Stilled are my tests, my bows
that sparked applause and mute
astonishment at the circus. Perilous
was my life while a drumroll
drove the terror.
Epitaph for a Lover
I will pursue that world promised
by your ecstatic glance. In successive
lives, in countrysides or cities,
when the styles are different,
when entire breeds of animals and flowers
are being exterminated,
my constancy will find you: juniper
bushes likewise live waiting for the sun.
Epitaph for a Poet