Light of Velintonia

For Vicente Aleixandre

Present in the clarity suspended, this garden

is time’s habitation.

                              Shoot of tenebrescence

fundament of the uninhabited sky,

puissance, pulsions that germinate and explode

in the flora of the air.

                                 Time is invisible

like the light of the garden: the garden is visible

behind the glass, not the image of the garden

in the successive light of temporality.

But another garden is visible as well: not a real place

that was, nor a place that existed in the mind,

not the succession of time in a single place,

but the persistence of atemporal time.

Arrect in an invisible setting, the garden

makes visible the light.

                                    If the voice designates

the clarity of this tree, if on the gate hands

enter the light of levitant place,

if we step into the center of an instantaneous whirlwind,

we are, without light or time, in invisibility.

The word of a man makes visible the real:

in the light, we may see the garden as garden.