Oh, nothing, nothing is mine,
not the tone of my voice, nor my absent hands,
nor my distant arms!
I have received it all. Oh, nothing, nothing is mine.
I am like the reflections of a gloomy lake
or the echo of voices at the bottom of a blue
well when it has rained.
I have received it all:
like water or glass
that turns into anything,
into smoke, into a spiral,
into a building, a fish, a stone, a rose.
I am different from me, so different,
like some people when they are in society.
I am all the places I have loved in my life.
I am the woman I hated most,
and the perfume that wounded me one night
with decrees of an uncertain destiny.
I am the shadows that entered a car,
the luminosity of a port,
the secret embraces hidden in the eyes.
I am the knife of jealousy,
and the aches red with wounds.
Of the long eager glances I am the sparkle.
I am the voice I heard behind the blinds,
the light, the air above the cypress trees.
I am all the words that I adored
on the lips, in the books that I admired.
I am the greyhound that fled in the distance,
the solitary branch among the branches.
I am the happiness of a day,
the whisper of the flames.
I am the poverty of naked feet,
with children going silently away.
I am what they did not tell me and I knew.
Oh, I wanted everything to be mine!
I am everything I have already lost.
But everything’s elusive like the wind and the river,
like the golden summer flowers
that die in your hands.
I am everything, but nothing, nothing is mine,
not the pain, nor the joy, nor the terror,
not even the words of my song.
How often the early-morning rains led me
happily along their paths, slowly dreaming,
to the crystal of the fields, among rows of pines,
seeking the favors of an astonishing light;
how often I saw them restore the extinct
windows, amid trees lost in the pure
tumult of their waves, that tied the ribbons
of the memories inhabiting their transparent walls.
Dazzled, I heard them hitting the skylights
with the soft insistence that precedes lightning
while in the leaves glittered the liquid
jewels that bathed the flowers and stems.
Enchanting the garden with sweet distances
in their murmur I always heard the echo of a piano
and discovered in the form of their tapestries
a deep greenhouse, heavenly in summer,
the columns of a temple with Asian statues,
packs of hounds descending to the foot of a slope,
a Mercury among plane trees and ecstatic fragrances
that expired wildly in the night.
I saw in their most turbid patterns the ancient floods
that enclosed trees, towers and men,
nascent cities and blond wheatfields
in muddy graves that bore no names;
and in the most detailed rains, alone, predestined,
the favorite names whirled in circles
until they found in gentle loving meters
the verses remembered, the verses promised.
Dizzy maze of mirrors
where the waves of the steps make love
transforming into swans slow arms
of gold, of ice, of water, of reflections.
Beloved face of the music
that speaks without voice and without words sings
in a center of clouds rousing
the mysteries of a magical plan.
Circle of incessant movements
sparkling among paper garlands.
Prefigured love of the lovers
who link thoughts with their hands.
Distance caressed by wings
of light as it rises and bends
like the flight of the bird illuminating
the color of its eager stops.
Constant sparkle tremulous and fertile
that endures in the ephemeral and varies
in the rites of sorrow and joy
upon the pale atriums of the world.
If the constancy of the dawn ceases
and one day the sun doesn’t rise and death comes
to the punctual splendor that announced it,
if in the marbled water
the heavenly memory of the star
upon a dark night doesn’t shine forever,
if a light tremor of wings in the trees
marks the silence of the birds,
if the night no longer soothes like balm
and becomes an inferno of water and mud,
if the pansy doesn’t open its corolla,
if the stubborn vine dies,
if the fruit and fragrance of the roses
vanishes in the deep gardens,
we will think we are still dreaming:
we will recall similar days
that we could not share with anyone,
days when the pain in our eyes
placed the image of the apocalypse.
Elegy for the Demolished Grove
Porticos, infernal edifices,
snakes adorned with leaves
that the hands of the Furies sculpted
in the wood of sweet plants.
Your masks don’t scare me, violence,
these trees are what I love.
They are angelic mansions of birds,
precincts for afternoon naps,
they are the roots of the pure hours,
the sieve of the rains, of the moon,
the galleries of lofty nights,
the most faithful illustrations of Paradise.
What lucky shadows have been lost,
what nocturnal songs, what joys
of darkness, of murmuring flights
not of light in the memory.
These trees are also mortal:
in the ancient language of plants
they spoke to the most sentient beings,
to those who were happy, to the sorrowful,
to those who contemplated in their leaves
the complicated face of love.
Torches, domes of the stars,
swings for the birds, the elves,
deep tabernacles of the breezes,
columns of the moon, casuarinas,
eucalyptuses benign and tortured
that have attended every dawn:
these are the very trees that speak to me,
these that lie injured
in the hot mud of the paths
improvising in vain long bridges
over the afternoon’s anthills,
over the escaping vine.
Oh Aristaeus, weep in these verses,
as when the bees died
in the burning hands of the nymphs
who avenged Eurydice and Orpheus.
Plunging it into the roses of its labyrinths,
a cyclone has destroyed the grove.
Pale incestuous daughter of Cinyras,
hiding your crime in Arabia;
Heliades, the crying of the leaves,
the light of your green eyes
is visible in the dark grasses;
your robes sow the dew.
Daphne, remember among the laurels
to cry the purple sorrows
of these plants that are more beautiful
in my province than spikenards and irises.
See how I kiss the injured branches
that my lips didn’t think to reach
except in intrepid faraway dreams,
in a lighter world, in other forests,
in a Paradise of thoughts
that the ecstatic glance contains.
See the rosy mist, the horizon
with its veils distancing the dove,
the shiny pomegranates, the offerings
of leafless mallows, the violets,
and in the mud the birds that have died,
their wings voluptuously stiff,
the fruits of the pine trees, the seeds,
the April sun as through ice,
the lacerated trunk, the bark,
over the gleaming rose, the sky.
Oh fraternal trees, the Furies
stalk us, sullen and attentive.
The same light illuminates us all,
protects us, leaves us united, alone.
The Fates who have woven destinies
with death enrich our life.
In grottoes of leaves and shadows,
birds more learned than the nightingale
enchant the mansions of these fields
where the musical silence is heard.
Time’s garlands are growing,
nothing stops them in their scope.
The subterranean forests of roots
adapt and flow like rivers.
When we die, trees, your attentive
fronds seem to sadden,
and a placid hum of beehives
is like the expression of our weeping.
The palms make grave movements
and impart consciousness to the flowers,
they lean upon the wind, at the windows,
obscuring summer suns.
Ah, how often did I listen in my grief
to the heart of the tree answering me.
In its uncommon fragrance of an armoire,
how well it keeps the memory. See my hands:
the nervatures in their palms
imitate the harmonic designs
that are not just an ornament of the leaves
but keys from mysterious gods.
I remember the morning dew
—a meticulous love tells them apart—
the golden dew of autumn and the blue
of winter in the birch flowers.
In every burning dewdrop
I see various birds in gardens:
each drop as different as the skies.
Trees, were we at some point
trees ourselves, and you men,
or do I alone suffer this metamorphosis
among the tall demolished shadows
with hands, leaves linked together?
In the many secret catalogues
of time, where will those
long and lucid dialogues be found
that I imagined having with those I loved,
with those who so often waited for me
and following the rites of absence,
bearing me sorrow or joy, answered
my desire and never my conscience.
Where was my present voice,
in space, in its uncertain dwelling
(that sleep like subterranean water
crosses with light in the deserted darkness)?
As with the black statue of Memnon
that emitted real harmonies,
through what ages of evasion will it echo
in the company of foreign voices?
With their constant illustrations
of forests and people and mansions
preserved between dazzling pages,
where are those apocryphal conversations
pronounced by no one?
Do they exist on the wings of the winds,
in the cruel bond of glances,
in the memories of the firmaments?
Do they exist with their labyrinths and loves
like half-ruined houses
that carry the memory’s colors
in lost or broken floor tiles?
Where is the intricate manuscript
with its trembling hand in space
that the night seems to have written
so slowly, following thoughts!
I think it is somewhere and I sense
that it transforms the trees, the roses,
the doubts of pain, thought,
lies, love, all things;
that it will not let me die in peace
ignoring the magnificent ceiling
or the splendor of the sun, pink and lilac,
over the long clouds at sunset
forming now another universe in time;
I glimpse it at night, terrified,
as in a deep mirror which on the back preserves
another truth, the one that is imagined.