AN ITALIAN COURTIER PINES FOR HIS
MISTRESS, THE LEARNED NUN, SISTER
UANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

Mexico, 1692

What a troupe of weeks has come

Prading through my life, each more dizzying

and acrobatic than the last. A regatta of days,

full of walks and rides and books

and quiet, illuminated hours during which we spoke

of nearly nothing, nearly everything.

Even her idle chatter has sunlit ways.

If only my wishes were homing pigeons

and I could shed the miles right now. What’s a day?

A few hours strapped together by the sun;

she’s made mine glide like a pendulum,

dividing and uniting in a stroke,

each moment meeting its double on the run,

till gravity pulls it back again.

But I’m lying. Time doesn’t move at all,

it stammers, it gags, it hiccups, it faints,

it throws tantrums, it sleeps till noon.

Time and I are like two ghouls

locked in the coliseum of these walls.

First it whips me with its long moaning hours

in which a minute is a multitude

and nothing can split the armor of a day.

And then I snake its wrist by nimbly picturing her:

the spa of her glance; her wit a whetstone

that sharpens itself; her long fluent fingers.

I think of her dressing in the morning,

when dew is a flat cloud on the grass,

and make the moment last longer

than her dressing does. Clothed in the soft linen

of her books, her old underlinens gone

to ragmen to be pulped for new books,

she is where the books begin and end.

Lucky linen, to have such a muse at hand.