Like a blind man listening to the shape of things,
or a forgotten hand that seeks romantic bonds
between the arms of a wicker easy chair,
like an imprisoned wizard in Tibet, or roses
that imitate each other, the tree that counts its days
by the daily songs of a bird that goes unseen,
like the narrow inlet, foreseeable death,
I persisted, unmoving, in the empty leaves.
Epitaph for a Shipwrecked Sailor
This is my first dream of shipwrecks,
I will never have to forget it. Dark
the water is in dreams, cold and hard.
Tomorrow I will be afraid of omens.
Epitaph for a Mariner
You were not gazing at the fallen leaves.
You went away from all the following
seasons, feeling immortal.
You loved tattoos and salt.
Mariner, with two oars you knew
the sea like a garden...then, you were gone.
Epitaph for an Aroma
When the dew descended yesterday,
amid future stamens and corollas,
I perished in a garden that presented
shadows in the shapes of trees, and water.
Two ribbons bound me, here they are:
longer than my petals they endured,
pale, like the ribbons of the dead.
The same implicit partnership of flowers,
the similar hands, the care,
the season and the blood of evening,
will not be able to repeat exactly
the dark tunnels of my aroma:
in memory they will be infinite,
the intricate paths of the perfume;
infinite, too, the deceptive
reappearance of every moment.
And though the days may want to bring it back,
and though many circumstances join together—
repetition of phrases or of people,
the same inclination of a head—
neither does that person exist anymore
for whom I was in secret destined.
To a Person Sleeping
Your brow will not be blinded:
in your closed eyes the world
you have seen will persist; its reflections
will be the tiles drawn
from tremulous memory that you have kept:
white staircases, a fish,
a lion with a gentleman’s face.
Everything is a lie and everything is true now:
you can be a criminal or a singer,
the unfaithful evening, the peaceful
coast where the ocean begins,
the palms and a braid from an engraving,
the slap in the face, the livid stiletto,
the false start of a sonnet.
Oh, if sleep had a long plot
like when we’re awake;
a different tale of life, other loves,
other ancestors, and in ultraviolet
colors seen by doves
other gardens, aromatic stones.
If astonished dreams could
seek each other out, if they were to meet...
to follow your fraternal dream
I would go unafraid as far as hell.
I would cross the dark prisons
of Piranesi or Kafka, the tortures
with certainty of shade, with patience,
and in bewildering times of clemency,
like Polycrates I would not cast away
my ring—all fortune I would keep
in a motionless posture of design,
in order to unite your sleep with mine.
Metrical Spaces
(Espacios métricos, 1945)
Irremissible Memory
for no one
Within me dwells that infinite impenetrable space
where you as well thought to discover the future;
in its shadow’s voice, as through a wall,
the implacable murmur besieged you from oblivion.
A murmur of images that marks not the hour,
the season, nor the place, that bears them trembling
to an incessant future that ever multiplies,
and we know not what angel, what fervor hoards it.
These lone images preserved, lost,
gathered by life as in a vast house,
well you know they persist in time that passes,
weaving in its secret nets other lives.
You know the verse forgotten in dreams is there,
the inadvertent phrase, the doorway seen
for an instant one night, the face that passed,
and the logs portrayed in the pale ashes.
There it will be easy to forget your lover.
There I will have died from bitter poison,
on an evening that I prolong in my sorrow
amid towering forests. There I will not have cried.
The imagined cedar beside the cedar will be
like that photograph, beside the lover,
so imperious and vivid in its melancholy,
it must not abandon us even in unfaithfulness.
Each tiger we ever saw exists and the garden
imagined on voyages plagiarized by our dreams.
Each night endures, counts up its leafage,
and the first day of the sea and of jasmine exists.
Everything we have seen in our distraction,
as if the world were to repeat its acts,
remains in us with each detail exact,
ardently pure, as in a passion.
And you whom I have not loved, and never recalled
on hearing certain music, with tremulous insistence,
you whose absence filled me with no pain,
you who could have loved me in vain... Perhaps
in that place I could love you still,
passing through barely glimpsed hallways,
among streets stained by time and without travails,
among pale garlands of uncertain joy.
The Infinite Horses
I have seen them sleeping in the pastures,
repeated through the fields, at rest;
furious I have seen them, on their knees,
like haughty gods, all in white,
dressed and with ribbons, and wild
with manes like the loosened hair
of ancient sirens on the beaches.
Snakes have dreamed of them,
the rushes and the resting mothers
dreaded them beneath the palm trees.
Trembling they announced battles,
announced the fear and constancy,
like a drumroll they trotted,
like applause in a cavernous theater.
They saw wounds bleeding in the mud,
they died among flowers, in puddles,
visited by birds and worms.
They approached carrying cherished men,
they approached with horrible tyrants
covered in purple and blood.
I will remember implacable horses:
the wild Tarpans of Russia; the Przewalskis;
the hundred and twenty names of horses
there in Rome, engraved in marble;
on the Olympus of Dionysus of Argos,
with a star branded on its flank,
of intoxicating bronze, the horse
whose love captivated the horses
that came to the sacred grove of Altis; the one
who so loved Semiramis, queen of Asia;
those who tasted with secret pleasure—
long before the Chinese did—
the green inspired leaves of tea;
that horse constructed by Virgil
whose kind and virtuous shadow
managed to heal other horses.
I will remember in an orange sky
horses illuminated in the shadows,
&nb
sp; anxiously uniting lovers
in peaceful grottoes at a distance.
Cain’s Words
I have seen birds die in the sun that hastens
the death of the leaves; huge plants die too,
and in the small death of multiform worlds
I have seen the appearance of the future truth.
With a jealous pain, with a thirsty sparkle,
now the vultures escort me, now my eyes contemplate
the inescapable blood amid the red pastures
and this unusual blood makes the wind cry.
I did not choose my brother, I did not choose this path.
With this stone I achieved my brother’s dying
but what despairs in me has not died with him.
Cruel and aggressive God, you declined my offering!
Over the foliage cry incestuous loves.
Why does memory infuse the singing of your birds
and why do those memories have grave accents!
Oh, why am I troubled by the joy of flowers,
the pleasure of rain and the handful of dirt,
and why am I troubled by the calm of evening,
the stone’s warmth after the burning day!
Jehovah, your treacherous space shuts me in like a cave.
On the dark hill my mother laments
the sky above the water diluted in mud
and the pale flock of sheep fleeing through the grass
bears the color of dust and his attentive hands.
With invisible weapons Jehovah alone has killed
the beasts and the trees with his divine breath,
inflicting his unjust, adamantine love.
He sees neither my sacrifice nor my desolate love.
In the narrow space life pursues me,
dead in the ground Abel still has not died.
I have seen his blue eye clearly in the sky
with a strange indefinite light of love.
Horses fear me, they grow distressed at my side
and the plants’ felicitous shade leaves
glowing burns on my brow and everything
that I’ve admired draws scornfully away from me.
Greater than my strength is this penitence:
at night and in darkened day I am pursued
by the divine and trembling voice of an angry God.
Solitude doesn’t exist, and if absence exists
it is only the mutation pursuing my life
from these blurry fields, from this sun that ensures
the death of the rose, that spoils fresh water
and the hypocritical tenderness of Abel who forgets me not.
I feel the immovable sorrow growing in my hair,
and on my face, in the cold, the summer’s heat.
Like an uncertain fruit that a worm devours
I feel a horrible glimmer in my anxious breast.
The reproach has prevented any remorse in me
removing the sweet glow of confidence,
it has destroyed the modesty of my despair.
I cannot live without him now: he is my sustenance.
He dwells now in my future children, in my loves,
in the irascible flame of yearning unextinguished
by the implacable aggression of the vague word,
in the faithfulness of the wheat, in the hills.
He dwells now in the substance of water, in the cisterns,
in the silent breeze at evening that passes
behind the mountains and links the branches,
he dwells now in the color of that eternal orbit.
Autobiography of Irene
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move.
Henry Vaughan, “The Retreat”
Like a tree-lined path settled
with houses and people, life
has led me to these silent places
where death, with its rites,
will calm my gloomy memories.
I am not worried by the avid mystery
that fate prepares with its veils,
its veins of marble and judgments
withering warnings in the flowers.
In sleepless contemplation
I am not haunted by the carriage
that will bring me to a lone cemetery
to deliver me to the infinite night.
The angel of the past is gentle, happy.
I listen to his peaceful language:
“If you want me to restore you to the past
you will have to take a long voyage with me.
The sky you’ve gazed at is in my eyes,
the water’s coolness is in my robes,
the breeze upon your brow is in my wings.
When you found sadness in the calla lilies
and comfort in the tall chrysanthemums,
anxiously you were seeking me. In your red
dresses and in your extreme vertigo
I cherished your long hopes.
I closed your eyelids wounded
by the sun’s rays as by lances.
Sorrows were your only sisters.
I kissed your afflicted lips,
I occupied the place of the missing.
The eloquent shadows of your soul I saw
decorated by the solitude
vainly calling me full of mercy.”
How sweet is death’s progress!
I hear the voices with their watery whisper
growing like roses, and luck
which stalked me sadly in the hallways
joyfully assists me.
The strident birds that used to sing
their scornful jeers at dawn
now have an innocent voice.
In the highest heavens I am praised
by the kisses of the cherub who honors me
among pink bucolic clouds.
The future inserts no change
in my countenance. At this very moment my face
alone in a mirror astonishes me and I want
to contemplate my features carefully
in these melancholy farewells.
Attentive are my eyes and sparkling
like water, with violet shadows
(the iris vacillating in color).
My two joined eyebrows are calm
not knowing the fervor in my high forehead
in my sweet silent lips,
harshly they appease my face.
Now I resemble certain saints
when the naked dawn illuminates them.
Now those branches of blue veins,
my distant arms, grow pale;
I feel the bonds braiding together
that set my life on fire with their flames.
Weariness settles in now,
repeated weariness, in my face,
weariness born in childhood,
and on a path all garlanded with hours
it might have led me to old age.
What used to pain me now pleases me.
I contemplate the helpless virtue
of my penultimate peaceful countenance.
As if this face were not mine now,
and how long it was mine!
Imagining its absence doesn’t scare me.
Oh, the future doesn’t scare me anymore!
The hours are passing so slowly.
I’m pale and my name is Irene
(I could dissolve into space
without any change in the world noticed).
Thirty years ago I was born in Las Flores,
and this village square will continue
to exist with summers and people
refreshing their evenings, their colors.
With a plant’s gratitude at the dew
I am drawing forth in great detail
the happiness of a desired memory,
serene there.
From this moment nothing separates
me.
I remember the gardens and the houses
where I played as a child. I was admired
for my long hair and eagerly bribed
with cakes and candies.
I always wore ribbons in my hair,
sometimes velvet ribbons.
I remember my astonishment, my dresses,
my sad relatives gathered together,
a vase with paper irises,
and the marble bust with a marble
veil fluttering as in a breeze.
I remember my father’s slow step
and the implacable color of his eyes,
my mother’s smell of bleach,
and from the tall dark privet
an ice-cream vendor announcing
the strawberry ice cream that I loved.
I remember deserted evenings,
the heat and the sprawling dogs,
the flies and the hotel and a great mystery
and the tranquility of a monastery
that neither sun nor singing brightened.
Full of shadows and idle fears,
in my fingers I remember the thorns
from roses robbed in the square
and that pockmarked gentleman
who invented punishments with my father.
Far along a dark path there,
running away from home,
inescapable, I find the impure memory
of a dialogue of love in summer
(I could repeat it but it’s long;
the blushing doesn’t relate to these moments).
I can still see across the sky,
like a winged worm, the long
blue flock of swallows flying;
and on school holidays
at the unfathomable hour of learning
the languid fruit that left
a golden kiss upon my skirt and
the garlands smelling of cinnamon and wisteria.
These things are not important
but I always wanted to remember them.
In vain I wanted it urgently.
So many days are added to the days
and there are such sad changes to the joys
that for the most ordinary people
the remembrance isn’t pure in memory.
I was loved by the sky and the melancholy
on hearing from a timid window
the tremulous persistence of a piano.
Sometimes I was passionately redeemed
by an anticipated teardrop in my hand.
Whose teardrop was it? I don’t know,
nor do I know where certain phrases
came from that I said aloud to the sky
or in the shadows on leaving the door ajar.
But something mysterious was guiding me:
I was the slave of my dark power.
In the last streets of this town,
when the neighing that gladdens the horses
could be heard in the distance,