Five Poems: Someone Else’s Eye, Music Remains, Emptiness, Young Love and Time
English translation by Luis Rafael Galvez
Reading time: (Number of words: )
I
The days gone by, where do they go?
Those little shadows of what one day was the sun?
Why what they call tomorrow is so elusive?
What rose from behind the mountains like a future?
The skin gels
Bones break
And days run like straw filaments in someone else’s eye.
II
Only the music remains after death
An old whisper of what we were
Will remain suspended over the candlewood of time
Perhaps someone will follow our steps
The imprints erased by the bubblings of an acoustic ocean
At least we shall be that:
Old sandals worn by a girl who follows
What we thought was the road.
III
To the Italian poet
Gerardo Sangiorgio (1921-1993)
And to think that nothing remains
That everything said is like a arrow thrown to the wind.
That even the words are evanescent
Fragile before the lips that pronounce them
That they could
(should) have been kept quiet
Everything is so fleeting
The raised hand
the tight fist
The craving mouth of desire
Nothing remains
Logic is impermanence
The anchor that holds on to death.
And its purest emptiness
IV
Days in the calendar
Are like ash birds
Curled towards a tiny windmill.
How the hours pass by surprises us
The unmasked skeletons of the years
Everything runs like a star made of ice
Like a meteorite without shadows
Amazing the blinking of the eyes
Before the vision of gone by trienniums
...Of what was one decade ago.
Time is like that
A flake of hardened snow
Melted on the spiral of a lightless brazier.
V
My young love
Speaks of lustrums and decades
As if they were a flower open
To the tongue of a butterfly
It is as if from its mouth everything would rejuvenate
Everything would acquire the shine of cellophane
For the Christmas we haven’t had yet
My young love speaks to me of Winter.
As if the time for autumn were still distant
For her, departures don’t exist
Our children rejoice on the tree of the night
the naked bellies await the warmth of a new moon
My young love doesn’t know a hundred years
Lasts only what a wick on a lamp’s surface.
Everything is gone for both of us
It all has ended for the both of us
My young love embraces me
She doesn’t know that one grows old
While a leaf falls on the garden’s lawn.
