Maybe it was the skin and not the soul
most qualified to calm me?
Why did I suddenly stare at a person
as if I saw a crown on her
that raised her to the rank of the gods?
Why did good inspire atrocious evil in me
and inextricable evil, some pleasure
that resembles, in the end, perishing?
◆◆◆
Why didn’t I contemplate other people
as attentively as a garden?
And why if they spoke to me did I go away
thinking about other things and listen
only to the concave cry of the wicked
statue shamed from a drawing room
or the lacerating noise of a pane of glass
humanly supernatural?
(I hardly know why they fascinated me
like voices singing in church.)
Repulsive and atrocious like perverse leprosy
that infects the mouth that kisses it,
like gangrene that pierces clear to the bones,
like rancor humiliated even by kisses,
as if golden and adored
sins are cultivated in my soul.
I am guilty. I need no wine
to get me drunk and the divine color
of any rose sticks its thorn in me,
to make me suffer, and the mean
indifference to humanity
pursues me. I don’t tell the truth
and if I do it’s as if I lied.
I am the horrible vine
that strangles the tree
because love binds me to the crime.
I live in a black-and-yellow world;
not only does joy glimmer,
fireworks gleam
like a teardrop in the eye,
so do the fingernails of the dead,
the putrid water in the harbor,
the shape of a glowing wound
in someone who is suddenly dying.
Only from interest do I love who loves me.
How different I am from some lama
who bears messages to Buddha, as in a bottle,
guided by his star!
Why did I invent the object I admired
and the one that was of value I rejected?
And why in vain did I anticipate the absence
like a phantom of my preference
seeking always to contradict the here and now,
the most perfect or what was ritual
placing its uncommon figure
beside the reality that must be pure?
Why has remorse lacerated my heart
with a wrong that I have not put right
not even in childhood in the cold mirrors
that were gray knives or else rivers?
Why was I what I was? I was what I am,
what I’m not used to being even today,
what love always led me to love
or else involuntarily to hate
as if there were a lion in my conscience
or a saint crouching in the illusion.
Will just the image alone be true
and the rest an illusion behind a closed
door that will never be opened
though the body could redeem itself?
Does just the image remain aloft
like the illuminating guardian flame?
Love
Love is like an enormous house
full of ornaments worth nothing
to one who doesn’t love and at a glance
assumes he knows the place and what things cost.
The intruder thinks, “Stuff like this
you can find anywhere—nothing’s original,
everything’s imaginary, nothing’s real.
Even the roses seem made of paper.”
Perhaps he’ll stop a moment
at the common place known as a bed,
with Cupid flying overhead,
and think, “And they call this romantic!”
But as a souvenir he’ll rob a rose.
Later, returning to his icy bedroom
praying, “I want to be in love,”
he’ll embrace his lover or his wife.
The Music’s Reproaches
If the dark is different from the light,
why is the day inhabited exclusively
by darkness and why do just the colors
that lead you to the center of the night
sparkle with supernatural hearth fires,
toads singing their long loves,
and other people who possibly exist.
I believe the light blinds you at times
and the darkness is a lamp.
why do you always kill yourself while alive
and live on when you’re nearly dead
after having drunk that poison
which is bitter and sweet and doesn’t kill,
those sour poisons from plants
and minerals you’ve tasted.
Maybe death will exist for others
and for you it doesn’t exist now, though you die.
If your pain is different from your pleasure,
why do you suffer so on gaining
the happiness you hoped for, why approach it
astonished with intimate indifference,
as in the tumultuous arena
a saint to be sacrificed among the lions,
when the sun goes down on the horizon
and a coolness of trees you hadn’t noticed
inside of hope detains you.
I believe your pleasure has edges
hard as the edge of stones
and that you’re groaning from more than pain.
If your hate is different from your love, listen to me,
why do you want to harm, make a martyr
of hope, counting off the time
without numbers or hands with the dripping
of slow infinite water clocks
in your imagination that stretches on
and at the torment of loving rushes you
to that ubiquitous place of absence
where you forget, do not forget, you
speak to and gaze at and overwhelm yourself again.
I don’t know, I don’t know why, I’ll never know
if you want to torture or be tortured.
If your innocence is different from your guilt
why do you expect a crime to purify
your guilt the more you feel it
and why seek only what is forbidden,
the absurd, the distant, the lost
contaminated by lesser sins
that are and are not your own.
Sleep’s Persuasion
What silent word am I not guessing?
What lesson have you learned that isn’t mine?
What destiny do I seek that is no longer yours?
What holds you in me? What love? What walls?
Money and shops do not exist,
nor the auctioning of old houses,
nor luxurious, miserable trash
in the houses that populate this earth.
The shoes we admired do not exist
lined up in the display windows
nor those rows of pastries, of hats,
waiting for someone to carry them off.
Green buttons do not exist, nor gray ones,
my God, nor the dress, each day
the collar, the neckties and suits,
nor handbooks or passports,
nor silvery fish and vegetables
in a dark corner of the market.
That gray waiting room does not exist,
nor the office with its shelves.
Now no one’s poverty exists
nor the speed of automobiles.
Come with me. The night prefers us.
Let’s follow a path that takes us
to a world w
ithout objects to love each other.
Let’s be silent. Let space
forget the words we spoke
in the most unlikely places.
The blinds are all closed;
no one passes on the streets.
The thieves are sleeping too,
and water, which never sleeps, is sleeping.
The rough stones with eyelids
lost in thought will see us pass.
The echo doesn’t interrupt its blue voice
in the perfect spots on earth.
Life is beautiful and horrible—
for being beautiful, horrible in being horrible.
Give me your hands in the darkness,
contemplate the visible in the shadows,
without looking, without thinking, without preference.
As if we were a marvelous
apparition of ourselves,
with our naked feet unmoving
let’s oppose wakefulness,
so that tomorrow we will be the others!
Translucent Alchemy
What stirring light there is in the air today!
The leaves aren’t moving. I’m not thinking about what I am.
If I were a tree I would be the tree you’re seeing
with its open crown, which will keep on growing.
If I were a bird I would be the one you’re hearing,
the strident song that tapers off in resignation;
and if I were a garden, this very garden,
my lungs hyacinths, my windpipe jasmine,
or if I were a stone, or merely dust, sand
spun by the wind with pitiless momentum,
I would be what I am, what I remember being,
in your translucent alchemy that makes me perish.
To My Despair
If you were someone,
a person, as you were at times,
it doesn’t matter where, in a tower,
at the seashore, in a market,
in a forest, in the snow,
on a dock, on a railway platform,
in a hotel where music echoes
or in a closed room where no one
would know that you love me as much
as I would always love you.
Oh, don’t leave me inside my habits
to be the sole victim of the fate
of my enemy ancestors,
of my friends now lost.
From your darkness make lightning spring forth
in the green oval of the leaves
to turn the torment into pleasure.
I will hear your haughty voice.
If your lips that kiss so much marble,
so many poor or powerful people,
so many beasts and so many plants
yesterday, today, and forever after
in the spent ring of the hours
hadn’t taught me your cruel wisdom
your dazzling transformations,
I would be no less afraid of your violence,
for you are more stubborn than the winds,
than virtue and sin,
than the constant seasons
and the thrush’s irritating song.
The Embrace
As in the labyrinth of a rose
prisoners among the soft and ordered
petals of love, with keys,
each pondered the same thought:
about separation, which is dreadful,
and the equilibrium of the embrace.
Solemnly they’d tell each other “Oh, you don’t know!”
and “I hate you!” in an affectionate voice.
Stretched out on the bed they evoked
the distant bonfires of childhood;
they evoked the arcane exuberance
of plant life, its continuous ambush,
and the habit they mutually acquired—
he of being honeysuckle, she a serpent.
Imitations
Lark, you never sing your particular
song because you sing
the song of other birds:
you don’t know this, you think you
always make up your own melodies
that other birds copy.
Darkness
Maybe no one loves you as I loved you that day.
Not even myself. How dark was the room.
In the joy that was also suffering
your secrecy was, in darkness, mine.
The metallic curtains and the wheels spinning,
the confused whir of elevators, the cables,
the variable scales in the sharp wind,
the itinerant cries with stretching voices
did not announce that things outside would go on
as always: the shops, the people, the carriages,
the political posters, the miseries, the voyages,
the broken briefcases, the shoes, the roses.
And to remind you, unintentionally, in my forgetfulness
I composed this catalogue of different sounds—
once vague, dispersed, now decipherable—
which gradually acquired meaning,
faces, myths, and then intricate vestments,
ritual perfections, building fronts,
in that light which sometimes even without love
consents, like eternity, to develop figures.
Facing the Seine Recalling the Río de la Plata
for Octavio Paz
No landscape loves and delights me,
Octavio, if it does not offer
in the mystery of its hills and plains
a jewel of water that lasts
as long as the eyes we adore
in the ardent oval of a face
or in the love that is only a mirror.
No landscape has a heart
nor holds so clearly in the mind
as that which in our musing presents
a starry sky in the water,
with cities and people who cross it
and bridges with doves, full moons.
Rivers are like veins
that spring from the heart and return!
They are like blue ribbons
joining one golden heart with another,
in books of romance or around a neck.
I would like to show you an enormous river
sometimes mistaken for the sea—
we call it the Río de la Plata
(the rivers of America are so large!).
That it gleam like silver hardly matters,
only that I see it always,
an iridescent pink or yellow,
without houses or people, over the mud,
a river where the clouds are reflected
with their stairways and towers,
their iron summits, their angels,
responding to the light among the shadows,
like the raven’s wing among the branches,
and that river I have seen in other rivers,
in the Tiber, the Arno, the Thames,
in the verdant Rhone, among the leaves,
and here in the swelling waves of the Seine,
as when we see in some just-discovered face
a face that was our own.
Illusion
There is a prayer
written by no one
that I sometimes say,
and others in despair
will say as well:
“I promise to feel
no other pain
if I cease to feel
the one that’s killing me now.”
Prisoner Between Glass
If I could peer at myself
imprisoned between glass plates
like an insect that a naturalist examines,
I would see me facing my own surprise.
Neither the scarab’s emerald,
nor the flamingo’s feathered rose,
nor the multiple eyes of flies
would confuse me so.
Oh, you
who can see me from outside
tell me what is happening with the trees,
with street corners, rooftops,
Venus and the moon, with men,
with gardens, boulevards,
the diving suit I’m wearing,
with the gleaming riverbank,
the long paths of eucalyptus,
the unbreathable cane flowers,
with anticipating the future,
with David’s golden ring,
with useless waiting, with hands
that say goodbye and always return,
return without dialogue, in silence,
what is happening with the intimate spikenards, with the eyes
that I seek unintentionally because they speak to me,
with the stone lions, the docks,
the distant flood of dances,
with marble Niobe, all in tears,
with the Brahms Requiem I did not hear
upon my failed deaths,
with the versatile course of
divine, pathetic, burning hours,
with what I am, was not, and perhaps will be,
with what I am and shall never be.
The Towns
for Dominga
I am inhabited by many towns. Like dreams they are
within my province, in me; they are memories of bread
from bakeries or light from a grocery store,
or evenings in the square as I watched the train arrive.
In waiting rooms, for many hours
with the quiet virtue of the dawn,
I glimpsed between the walls the darkness of a pine,
summer siestas, the tepid scent of wine.
Many times, with melancholy I glimpsed
parishioners seated along the sidewalk in summer
or girls like stars their knowing pose against
a balcony’s bright railing, much admired.
I looked out at the ebbing sun’s lagoons
in the reddened west with the fleeing horse,
I looked out with a thousand lives at the fields
like seas upon the shores of those budding towns
(north, south, east, west, I was born
without noticing in every house I saw).
With an innocent enthusiasm for postcards
I have collected each place or inside a bell jar
like the kind with the glittering Virgin of Luján.
I sense that someday I will die in every town,
at the same time of evening, without discriminating
that I may love them all, ubiquitous, with many hearts.
Childhood Home
Like an ice palace in Russia
or a clever transparent watch,
I see the design and inner workings
of my childhood home everywhere in my dreams.
A plant in the patio, far from the sun, showed
the storm and the sky it watched alone.
The raindrops upon the skylight windows
hatched lilacs on the glass, fleeting jewels,