Did he foresee in the cracked scar of the trunk
the mortal wound that Artabanus would deal him in Persepolis?
Those divinatory forms
were less important than the tree itself for Xerxes,
blinded by its beauty:
he forgot his son Artaxerxes, the long-handed,
his three banished brothers,
the crossing of the Hellespont,
Egypt, Persia, everything but the tree.
Into the night, ecstatic as in a miniature
he stayed by the trunk beneath the big leaves.
The slack-eyed soldiers lay
in the heavy dust of sleep.
On its branches he hung necklaces, bracelets, rings of gold and precious stones.
“You are not an animal nor a woman and I set off
like a man who has embraced his love in the night”—
and thinking these words the king moved his lips as if speaking.
The tree responded as love does,
like the Sirens’ never-fathomed song
to Ulysses.
The Pines
You didn’t listen to the beating of a tree’s heart,
couched against the trunk gazing upwards,
you didn’t see the leaves moving
with the throb of a heart,
you didn’t feel the shudder
of the branches swaying above your body,
you didn’t listen to the heart of the pines
when the wind moves them and their leaves fall
like green fragrant pins,
and when the clouds passed,
you didn’t see the world, the whole world turning,
you didn’t feel the sky drawing near,
entering inside the pines,
and yourself disappearing, penetrating with it
inside the pines, becoming in that sky another tree.
My Distant Feet
Where did my distant feet remain
and those blue rivers of veins
so carefully distributed.
As if I were a dark, mysterious trunk,
the doctors lean over and look at me.
Where were my knees alone,
twins of astonishment, shaken,
where, if I have not died,
were the quiet wings of my movements,
those vestments, vain perhaps,
required by my soul, so cherished.
Where, if I still breathe,
were the clean galleries of rest,
their catalogues so luminous,
where. No longer do the portraits terrify me
nor the voices of approaching men.
Where did my face remain
shared among faces that were not mine,
between wanting to die and not dying,
between knowing that death
or ordinary life will exist forever.
Two larks were beating at
the windowpanes where I awaited you,
oh moon and Venus, Venus that ascended
in the sky at night, every night.
Love Pursued
You thought that in the night
were places so remote
love could hide away
forever there,
but the day pursues
the night and darkness
ends with beds.
Sleeping Hydra
Sometimes when I see
lightning at the window
I want the rain
to penetrate my body,
and each sapling
of my veins to grow
into a tree and form
an impenetrable forest
and from each braid
in my hair
to spring those serpents
that because of you I wear
across my heart
and change you into stone.
Inscriptions Cain Read in Abel’s Eyes
We were the first two brothers,
I the first dead man and you the first
fratricide. The summers will pass.
The moon will wane unnoticed,
but never will my memory in you.
Like a hybrid star in the sky
I’ll always follow you. I don’t lose my way.
Sleep cannot veil
my portrait, full of love
and cherubs. Like a green fly
that returns, like an error,
like a viper coiling,
you will see me; others will not.
I shall be the world’s first ghost.
You will not fear the lions nor the colts,
nor your wanderer’s fatigue,
nor the storms, nor eclipses,
nor our mother always teaching me
how to draw ellipses with branches.
You will fear me only, hating me.
The Sibyl Speaks to Her Consultants
I believe our destiny is everywhere:
pencil in hand, it follows us around
with its gaping throat, its tongue a whip.
Like a teacher with bad students
sometimes it grows heated and hates us, punishes us;
like children who can’t read yet,
they watch the passing signs imagining something else
then finally ask me to show them.
Tree, house, mountain, breakwater,
black tracks of mud, insect among the roses,
gloves forgotten on the chair, grove of trees,
dock of farewell, tendrils and storms,
stains on half-demolished walls,
fifty-cent coins, treacherous moons!
In you are the varied portraits
of the future tyrant who will devastate the country,
the flaming angel who must protect us,
the mysterious house we will occupy,
the face of our rival or lover.
I am the servant watching what the master shows me,
the servant who transmits its divine messages
with hands upheld and rapt, vigilant eyes.
Trees of Buenos Aires
(Árboles de Buenos Aires, 1979)
The Trees’ Abode
In the Botanical Garden at closing time
beneath dancing iridescent lights,
I’ve seen trees and statues come alive,
and it’s not an illusion, not a passing breeze
moving the leaves and the folds in the tunics.
They take each other by the hand, bathe in the fountain,
enter the light of large greenhouses
until dawn arrives in its celestial habit.
Oh, who shall know what the plants say.
“We’re hermaphrodites,” some will confess;
“Only by loving do I procreate,” whispers another enigmatically.
I cannot repeat what they really say.
To suppose is to kill or perhaps to create?
If everything is a miracle proclaimed by light,
if everything is a secret uttered by the leaves,
maybe in the jungle it shall be deciphered?
To fall asleep on some immovable bench along a path,
to feel the enamored night slowly expire,
that is what I’ve always wanted since this intimate
garden existed where trees copulate at night
and by day men raise their hopes.
Having always lived in a garden I would like
to be at night a tree, and a tree as well by day.
They should let me dwell in their deep precincts
so that I can live the life of trees.
This is what the plants must hear with their leaves
at the receding steps of someone who adores them,
someone who lives in them as algae live
from the iodine, the salt, the foam, and the water.
They’re not trying to escape, to reach the street,
to go down to the river where the boats set sail.
They know that God is always the same everywhere.
Fragrance
I who live close by
bear witness that at certain hours
of the night or day
it floods the areas of the square where it lives
and enters the windows of neighboring houses;
it’s more important than the corporeal
beauty of the trees because even the blind can see it
through the illusion of perfume,
as through music.
Often, at any hour,
I tried like a sleuth to find where that heavenly
fragrance came from and I reached the conclusion
that it’s simply like the soul
lodging nowhere and all about.
Palm Tree in the Window
In the window with memories of the sea
with reminiscences of rivers
of the Bible and of deserts
a palm tree moves its leaves.
Does it too suffer from living in the city
or does it stand so high in the sky
that it avoids the miseries of our civilization?
Maybe it’s unaware of what’s happening at its feet.
Dogs bark in the distance, they don’t bother it;
doves flap their wings in the palm leaves,
the tree doesn’t feel them;
children throw stones, it doesn’t glance their way;
music, planes break the silence, it doesn’t hear them.
If trees sleep, it too will sleep.
Closing the blinds
in its trunk
thousands of eyelids shut
for the night as the blue
labyrinth of a storm approaches.
But I know it sails in favor of the wind
over the plants and the frightened
birds like a goddess in love
and it will awaken with the splendor of cataclysms.
Engraved Messages
The words
engraved in the trees
persist:
they tell a story
of love, crime, incest, innocence.
The words
engraved in the trees
look like telegrams
written with a delirious pen,
of love or menace.
Sometimes no one
can make out the letters
or catch the meaning of some name
but it is always studied
like an important picture,
an obscure hieroglyphic.
In the writing on those trunks
that serve as a bulletin board
is woven the life
of men as sad, as happy,
as awful
as the world makes them.
Now and then a woodpecker
chips away at it.
Tenderness springs forth again
with wild or romantic knives
to inscribe the heart
made of names.
Jacaranda
The faint, subtle luminosity of the jacaranda
hides here amid the common greenery
of other plants and an unlit streetlight.
It’s not trying to show itself, to impress,
to impose its beauty.
Almost blue it’s not blue,
almost violet it’s not violet,
but when we walk upon its flowers
we walk upon the sky.
If there were saints among trees,
jacaranda, you would be my saint
and I would place at your feet
the offering
of your own flowers.
Ubiquitous Color
Perhaps Cornelius Agrippa would have captured
in his mirror
this violet amethyst light
playing ruefully in the air
penetrating the shadows
having no form
because it is changeable
difficult to capture
like petals in the wind
being spirit
fluttering in the face of the world
with wings of no bird,
the mysterious
vehemence of this ubiquitous color
that flees staying
and fleeing stays.
Not being a stone
with the phantasmagoria of the stone,
not being a flower with the science of the flower.
Rain, cloud, space, nothing more.
Apologia
I didn’t want to speak of the trees
as if they were people,
nor attribute to them my sensibilities,
so superior do I consider them.
Nor did I want to speak in the trees’ name
as if I had been one of them,
nor give them the tone of my voice,
so ineffable do I judge them.
I hoped to assume a different form
in order to speak of them.
To forget how I feel,
how I listen, how I see,
but that is as impossible
as asking a tree not to have freshness in its leaves,
nor growth in its roots,
nor shade, nor fragrance,
nor the swaying of its branches in the wind.
Unpublished and Scattered Poetry
(Poesía inédita y dispersa, 2001)
Singular Wisdom
The only thing we know
is what surprises us:
that everything happens, as
if it hadn’t happened.
Apocryphal Picture
The saint turns into a prostitute;
the lion, the monkey, the angel, the fish into a garden;
four children playing tag, into a beach.
With the vicissitudes of time or by chance
that was the original—like our memories!
Vanity of Vanities
We live for a house
we won’t be able to build,
for a voyage we won’t take,
and for a book we’ll
never get to write;
like a drawing traced
upon a page too narrow
to make room for
the entire plan.
Nocturne
Houses dream they are boats at night
in the wind and darkness and rain.
Perplexity
Why do I always think
when I kneel down to pray,
“What are my feet doing now?”
Complete Forgetfulness
Complete forgetfulness
hands us the keys to the most
inextricable secrets.
If we lose something,
we should look at once for something else:
right away what we were looking for will appear
multiplied by what we are looking for now.
We find something, yes,
but, oh disenchantment,
what we were looking for until that moment
no longer exists anywhere in the world.
When I gaze at a portrait
I feel the life escape me.
Old age has its tricks:
we lose what we need to lose
of our vitality
in order not to die of anguish.
Cumulus Nimbus
I have learned to read
the language of the sky at dawn,
in absolute silence,
which never exists.
In the clouds that pass and intersect,
mingle and tear apart,
join together offbeat,
I find the secret of life.
I’m not trying to know, by their density, if it will rain;
by their color, if it will be hot or cold;
if time dominion of the sun
will spread its nets, by their intensity;
if there will be floo
ds or droughts.
Something shows me the course of destiny.
Each cloud is a map,
a shuffled card,
with no hands to move it,
no order to require it.
Your Name
No one can pronounce your name.
I alone know the perfect inflection.
They lack the tenderness of its flow
and the sweetness of its consonants.
They don’t know how to isolate the color
of its exact musical note.
That’s why each day I respond
by inventing a name:
blue, bird, breeze, light.
Common words
that can be said simply
even without knowing you, without loving you.
Death of My Father
Outside a thrush was calling me from its cage,
which I had recently brought back from Córdoba.
The hot January between cold blinds
showed passionately its illuminated edge
and I gazed in surprise, feeling like a stranger,
at the plants, the mirrors, the portraits, the chairs,
the ancestral goods, the fresh mats,
the shiny trembling stillness of the spider,
as if I saw myself among objects
deserting the human. No doubt grief
troubled me in some mysterious, imperious way,
making me as numb as a marble slab.
Neither night nor day varied in the house
but I recognized the day by the song
of so many kiskadees and the night by so many
crickets singing in the endless silence.
Darkened hours, along with daily habits
cracked open the doors so that shadows
closed them and as if they were thrusting
a sword into his chest, my father was dying.
The urns of agony filled the house with passion.
I imagined him fighting against armies to a
lifeless dawn, against fire and ice to death.
Then it rained, at last! The rain fell upon his heart.