for no one
Within me dwells that infinite impenetrable space
where you as well thought to discover the future;
in its shadow’s voice, as through a wall,
the implacable murmur besieged you from oblivion.
A murmur of images that marks not the hour,
the season, nor the place, that bears them trembling
to an incessant future that ever multiplies,
and we know not what angel, what fervor hoards it.
These lone images preserved, lost,
gathered by life as in a vast house,
well you know they persist in time that passes,
weaving in its secret nets other lives.
You know the verse forgotten in dreams is there,
the inadvertent phrase, the doorway seen
for an instant one night, the face that passed,
and the logs portrayed in the pale ashes.
There it will be easy to forget your lover.
There I will have died from bitter poison,
on an evening that I prolong in my sorrow
amid towering forests. There I will not have cried.
The imagined cedar beside the cedar will be
like that photograph, beside the lover,
so imperious and vivid in its melancholy,
it must not abandon us even in unfaithfulness.
Each tiger we ever saw exists and the garden
imagined on voyages plagiarized by our dreams.
Each night endures, counts up its leafage,
and the first day of the sea and of jasmine exists.
Everything we have seen in our distraction,
as if the world were to repeat its acts,
remains in us with each detail exact,
ardently pure, as in a passion.
And you whom I have not loved, and never recalled
on hearing certain music, with tremulous insistence,
you whose absence filled me with no pain,
you who could have loved me in vain... Perhaps
in that place I could love you still,
passing through barely glimpsed hallways,
among streets stained by time and without travails,
among pale garlands of uncertain joy.
I have seen them sleeping in the pastures,
repeated through the fields, at rest;
furious I have seen them, on their knees,
like haughty gods, all in white,
dressed and with ribbons, and wild
with manes like the loosened hair
of ancient sirens on the beaches.
Snakes have dreamed of them,
the rushes and the resting mothers
dreaded them beneath the palm trees.
Trembling they announced battles,
announced the fear and constancy,
like a drumroll they trotted,
like applause in a cavernous theater.
They saw wounds bleeding in the mud,
they died among flowers, in puddles,
visited by birds and worms.
They approached carrying cherished men,
they approached with horrible tyrants
covered in purple and blood.
I will remember implacable horses:
the wild Tarpans of Russia; the Przewalskis;
the hundred and twenty names of horses
there in Rome, engraved in marble;
on the Olympus of Dionysus of Argos,
with a star branded on its flank,
of intoxicating bronze, the horse
whose love captivated the horses
that came to the sacred grove of Altis; the one
who so loved Semiramis, queen of Asia;
those who tasted with secret pleasure—
long before the Chinese did—
the green inspired leaves of tea;
that horse constructed by Virgil
whose kind and virtuous shadow
managed to heal other horses.
I will remember in an orange sky
horses illuminated in the shadows,
anxiously uniting lovers
in peaceful grottoes at a distance.
I have seen birds die in the sun that hastens
the death of the leaves; huge plants die too,
and in the small death of multiform worlds
I have seen the appearance of the future truth.
With a jealous pain, with a thirsty sparkle,
now the vultures escort me, now my eyes contemplate
the inescapable blood amid the red pastures
and this unusual blood makes the wind cry.
I did not choose my brother, I did not choose this path.
With this stone I achieved my brother’s dying
but what despairs in me has not died with him.
Cruel and aggressive God, you declined my offering!
Over the foliage cry incestuous loves.
Why does memory infuse the singing of your birds
and why do those memories have grave accents!
Oh, why am I troubled by the joy of flowers,
the pleasure of rain and the handful of dirt,
and why am I troubled by the calm of evening,
the stone’s warmth after the burning day!
Jehovah, your treacherous space shuts me in like a cave.
On the dark hill my mother laments
the sky above the water diluted in mud
and the pale flock of sheep fleeing through the grass
bears the color of dust and his attentive hands.
With invisible weapons Jehovah alone has killed
the beasts and the trees with his divine breath,
inflicting his unjust, adamantine love.
He sees neither my sacrifice nor my desolate love.
In the narrow space life pursues me,
dead in the ground Abel still has not died.
I have seen his blue eye clearly in the sky
with a strange indefinite light of love.
Horses fear me, they grow distressed at my side
and the plants’ felicitous shade leaves
glowing burns on my brow and everything
that I’ve admired draws scornfully away from me.
Greater than my strength is this penitence:
at night and in darkened day I am pursued
by the divine and trembling voice of an angry God.
Solitude doesn’t exist, and if absence exists
it is only the mutation pursuing my life
from these blurry fields, from this sun that ensures
the death of the rose, that spoils fresh water
and the hypocritical tenderness of Abel who forgets me not.
I feel the immovable sorrow growing in my hair,
and on my face, in the cold, the summer’s heat.
Like an uncertain fruit that a worm devours
I feel a horrible glimmer in my anxious breast.
The reproach has prevented any remorse in me
removing the sweet glow of confidence,
it has destroyed the modesty of my despair.
I cannot live without him now: he is my sustenance.
He dwells now in my future children, in my loves,
in the irascible flame of yearning unextinguished
by the implacable aggression of the vague word,
in the faithfulness of the wheat, in the hills.
He dwells now in the substance of water, in the cisterns,
in the silent breeze at evening that passes
behind the mountains and links the branches,
he dwells now in the color of that eternal orbit.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move.
Henry Vaughan, “The Retreat”
Like a tree-lined path settled
with houses and people, life
has led me to these silent places
where death, with its rites,
will calm my gloomy memories.
I am not worried by the avid mystery
that fate prepares with its veils,
its veins of marble and judgments
withering warnings in the flowers.
In sleepless contemplation
I am not haunted by the carriage
that will bring me to a lone cemetery
to deliver me to the infinite night.
The angel of the past is gentle, happy.
I listen to his peaceful language:
“If you want me to restore you to the past
you will have to take a long voyage with me.
The sky you’ve gazed at is in my eyes,
the water’s coolness is in my robes,
the breeze upon your brow is in my wings.
When you found sadness in the calla lilies
and comfort in the tall chrysanthemums,
anxiously you were seeking me. In your red
dresses and in your extreme vertigo
I cherished your long hopes.
I closed your eyelids wounded
by the sun’s rays as by lances.
Sorrows were your only sisters.
I kissed your afflicted lips,
I occupied the place of the missing.
The eloquent shadows of your soul I saw
decorated by the solitude
vainly calling me full of mercy.”
How sweet is death’s progress!
I hear the voices with their watery whisper
growing like roses, and luck
which stalked me sadly in the hallways
joyfully assists me.
The strident birds that used to sing
their scornful jeers at dawn
now have an innocent voice.
In the highest heavens I am praised
by the kisses of the cherub who honors me
among pink bucolic clouds.
The future inserts no change
in my countenance. At this very moment my face
alone in a mirror astonishes me and I want
to contemplate my features carefully
in these melancholy farewells.
Attentive are my eyes and sparkling
like water, with violet shadows
(the iris vacillating in color).
My two joined eyebrows are calm
not knowing the fervor in my high forehead
in my sweet silent lips,
harshly they appease my face.
Now I resemble certain saints
with a waxy whiteness among the plants
when the naked dawn illuminates them.
Now those branches of blue veins,
my distant arms, grow pale;
I feel the bonds braiding together
that set my life on fire with their flames.
Weariness settles in now,
repeated weariness, in my face,
weariness born in childhood,
and on a path all garlanded with hours
it might have led me to old age.
What used to pain me now pleases me.
I contemplate the helpless virtue
of my penultimate peaceful countenance.
As if this face were not mine now,
and how long it was mine!
Imagining its absence doesn’t scare me.
Oh, the future doesn’t scare me anymore!
The hours are passing so slowly.
I’m pale and my name is Irene
(I could dissolve into space
without any change in the world noticed).
Thirty years ago I was born in Las Flores,
and this village square will continue
to exist with summers and people
refreshing their evenings, their colors.
With a plant’s gratitude at the dew
I am drawing forth in great detail
the happiness of a desired memory,
serene there.
From this moment nothing separates me.
I remember the gardens and the houses
where I played as a child. I was admired
for my long hair and eagerly bribed
with cakes and candies.
I always wore ribbons in my hair,
sometimes velvet ribbons.
I remember my astonishment, my dresses,
my sad relatives gathered together,
a vase with paper irises,
and the marble bust with a marble
veil fluttering as in a breeze.
I remember my father’s slow step
and the implacable color of his eyes,
my mother’s smell of bleach,
and from the tall dark privet
an ice-cream vendor announcing
the strawberry ice cream that I loved.
I remember deserted evenings,
the heat and the sprawling dogs,
the flies and the hotel and a great mystery
and the tranquility of a monastery
that neither sun nor singing brightened.
Full of shadows and idle fears,
in my fingers I remember the thorns
from roses robbed in the square
and that pockmarked gentleman
who invented punishments with my father.
Far along a dark path there,
running away from home,
inescapable, I find the impure memory
of a dialogue of love in summer
(I could repeat it but it’s long;
the blushing doesn’t relate to these moments).
I can still see across the sky,
like a winged worm, the long
blue flock of swallows flying;
and on school holidays
at the unfathomable hour of learning
the languid fruit that left
a golden kiss upon my skirt and
the garlands smelling of cinnamon and wisteria.
These things are not important
but I always wanted to remember them.
In vain I wanted it urgently.
So many days are added to the days
and there are such sad changes to the joys
that for the most ordinary people
the remembrance isn’t pure in memory.
I was loved by the sky and the melancholy
on hearing from a timid window
the tremulous persistence of a piano.
Sometimes I was passionately redeemed
by an anticipated teardrop in my hand.
Whose teardrop was it? I don’t know,
nor do I know where certain phrases
came from that I said aloud to the sky
or in the shadows on leaving the door ajar.
But something mysterious was guiding me:
I was the slave of my dark power.
In the last streets of this town,
when the neighing that gladdens the horses
could be heard in the distance,
my girlish sadness grew heavier:
the horses wounded by lightning,
transformed into black skeletons,
I foresaw them in coming storms
or else dying in the hard earth
unable to find clean watering holes,
to discover the dawn’s caress.
And the hum of the cars moving off,
in the circular night carrying
shipments of feed, brought me
to remote and future places
in the quiet province among the villas,
crossed by roads among ribbons
of rosebushes clinging to the walls.
With the fluttering transparency of a veil
the future revealed names to me,
faces before having known them,
paths before having traveled them.
I saw things transformed
by eager time, re-formed.
I could remember only the future:
how my house was going to be, not as it was,
the boys already with faces of men,
the rosebuds withered,
the absent vine blooming.
I could see the people dead
who were about to die, and those anxious zones
in my memories of the future
I never communicated to anyone.
Mysterious phrases silenced me.
I was quiet and I liked to hear
those who remembered the past
(that realm prohibited to me).
I only remembered the future!
Sometimes I tried to modify
the sad parts of the future, in vain:
I couldn’t bring the summer rains
and my parents lost their crops,
nor could I make my cousin love
that boy who was in love with her.
I mustn’t think so quickly,
I’d tell myself, but my thoughts
were arrows that made me bleed
like Saint Sebastian in his agony,
swept with rapture in the engravings.
I tried to invent beautiful things,
destinies and affectionate people,
but I recognized clearly
the essential difference that existed
between the forecast of the future
and the invention that was mine alone.
Those images of the future
were unmistakable since they arrived
with the fragrance of plants when it rains.
They were not vague like others. They grew larger.
Seeing them, I always heard clearly
the rustle of the wind rising.
In the distance glass shattered,
a frozen pane of glass and very high up
whose pieces have always managed
with mysterious and liquid coolness
to sprinkle a side of my face.
Since I was a child I’ve been gentle and industrious.
I liked history and grammar
and in the square among flowers
the peaceful enigmatic shade of the fountain.
I embroidered sky-blue daisies
on a tablecloth praised by visitors
while they kindly watch me die.
Once I scared myself imagining
the figure of the devil who’d come
from a neighbor’s house and looked at me
with his arms crossed over his chest.
I was surprised that he was so short,
that he seemed a man forsaken,
and after passing restless days
awaiting the horror of his arrival,
nervous and trembling, desperate
I found one day in that same house
(now at last I can remember it)
in a book of religious tales
the same devil pale and battered.
Some music cannot be sung:
like infinite loves
cloistered is the recollection of its rites.
But now I have penetrated your memory,
oh Gabriel, whose surprise dazzles me,
I waited for this moment to see you
(this moment, the end now of my story).
I knew you long before meeting you:
already I foresaw how I was going to forget you,
and I tried in vain to avoid your encounter.
I was forgetting you as I led you by the hand.
Your soft golden hair illuminates
a song of stars and death.
I corrected your homework, your dictations
with the felicity of your glance.
I knew our dialogues of love
would be forgotten. Weary,
I left your side without memories...
I sought your face in the golden grains,
in other youths through whom I weep for you,
among heavenly rains, among altars,
in photographs of the sea.
Although I’m alone now I don’t miss you.
A memory of love is infinite—
it can sustain the space between my arms.
I carry you in the rose of a thousand snares,
in the conformation of my desires,
in the seraphic passion of the dawn,
in the chosen and venerated flower,
in the happy vision of my outings.
And it’s only here in death I’ll find
the dazzling truth of love.
Already I see it arriving. Oh shiny
vine of my days, how the sweet
shade waits...
Don’t be afraid to die in vain
like a sad dahlia in summer.
Neither death nor worms dared
devour my daily body.
As Diocletian loved his gardens,
I love these precincts. Come, brother,
among the dead I am the most human.
And tomorrow who will deign to come
visit these gardens, captive like me,
and then include you in final verses
following the footpaths from your forms.
Who will be loved in your breast, beloved, faraway,
after having been joined to your reflections.
Oh, to whom will you speak of me, beloved,
and who will see that lover’s light
by which I die now being dead
from this life of the dead that is not certain.
On nights in the cool golden world,
among ferns and hydrangeas along a river,
with what interlocutor will you love
tropical seashores.
At the end of the day whom will you reproach,
for the jealousy, the ineffectual grief,
and that baleful circumspect glance,
so cherished, at love’s beginnings.
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
Tennyson, “In Memoriam”
Approach my shadow slowly,
look at the bronze gold of my flowers
and in the winter garden the putti
in the mirror of leaves, persevere.
Listen to the ancient noise of my doors,
the elevator, the rain that beats upon
skylight windows, the roof terrace
and the patio that hears the silent bells.
Listen in my lost vestibules
to the forms of the names that were heard
moving in the time they lived,
that furniture fitted with slipcovers,
and the black upright piano
sounding its chords in the evening
as on a quiet lake along whose edge
the faltering voice of time is heard.
Consider one by one my window blinds,
opening and closing through the day
upon the lofty sky and the shaded wall.
Consider my moldings: they are human.
Contemplate the quiet parlor ceiling,
and in a radiant picture the lady
with a strange hand who courts
the innocent glance and signals
suppertime. Gently
breathe in my vague odors
risen from the carpet and the floors,
from the marble and the indifferent iron.
Contemplate one by one each face
that looked into the mirrors on my doors,
the heads of hair, all their reflections
and the joy that pain prepares.
Silently, go through my rooms.
Ah, no one is there, and the noonday sun
pierces the windows with melancholy.
What darkness with grainy light
follows your steps into my clarity!
In the farthest room, who awaits you
that your presentiment despairs!
Perhaps there is someone in my solitude.
Why do you so fear it if only
in your dreams it exists, that dark instant
of this ancient mansion, shuddering,
where a nameless ghost persists.