In the Botanical Garden at closing time
beneath dancing iridescent lights,
I’ve seen trees and statues come alive,
and it’s not an illusion, not a passing breeze
moving the leaves and the folds in the tunics.
They take each other by the hand, bathe in the fountain,
enter the light of large greenhouses
until dawn arrives in its celestial habit.
Oh, who shall know what the plants say.
“We’re hermaphrodites,” some will confess;
“Only by loving do I procreate,” whispers another enigmatically.
I cannot repeat what they really say.
To suppose is to kill or perhaps to create?
If everything is a miracle proclaimed by light,
if everything is a secret uttered by the leaves,
maybe in the jungle it shall be deciphered?
To fall asleep on some immovable bench along a path,
to feel the enamored night slowly expire,
that is what I’ve always wanted since this intimate
garden existed where trees copulate at night
and by day men raise their hopes.
Having always lived in a garden I would like
to be at night a tree, and a tree as well by day.
They should let me dwell in their deep precincts
so that I can live the life of trees.
This is what the plants must hear with their leaves
at the receding steps of someone who adores them,
someone who lives in them as algae live
from the iodine, the salt, the foam, and the water.
They’re not trying to escape, to reach the street,
to go down to the river where the boats set sail.
They know that God is always the same everywhere.
I who live close by
bear witness that at certain hours
of the night or day
it floods the areas of the square where it lives
and enters the windows of neighboring houses;
it’s more important than the corporeal
beauty of the trees because even the blind can see it
through the illusion of perfume,
as through music.
Often, at any hour,
I tried like a sleuth to find where that heavenly
fragrance came from and I reached the conclusion
that it’s simply like the soul
lodging nowhere and all about.
In the window with memories of the sea
with reminiscences of rivers
of the Bible and of deserts
a palm tree moves its leaves.
Does it too suffer from living in the city
or does it stand so high in the sky
that it avoids the miseries of our civilization?
Maybe it’s unaware of what’s happening at its feet.
Dogs bark in the distance, they don’t bother it;
doves flap their wings in the palm leaves,
the tree doesn’t feel them;
children throw stones, it doesn’t glance their way;
music, planes break the silence, it doesn’t hear them.
If trees sleep, it too will sleep.
Closing the blinds
in its trunk
thousands of eyelids shut
for the night as the blue
labyrinth of a storm approaches.
But I know it sails in favor of the wind
over the plants and the frightened
birds like a goddess in love
and it will awaken with the splendor of cataclysms.
The words
engraved in the trees
persist:
they tell a story
of love, crime, incest, innocence.
The words
engraved in the trees
look like telegrams
written with a delirious pen,
of love or menace.
Sometimes no one
can make out the letters
or catch the meaning of some name
but it is always studied
like an important picture,
an obscure hieroglyphic.
In the writing on those trunks
that serve as a bulletin board
is woven the life
of men as sad, as happy,
as awful
as the world makes them.
Now and then a woodpecker
chips away at it.
Tenderness springs forth again
with wild or romantic knives
to inscribe the heart
made of names.
The faint, subtle luminosity of the jacaranda
hides here amid the common greenery
of other plants and an unlit streetlight.
It’s not trying to show itself, to impress,
to impose its beauty.
Almost blue it’s not blue,
almost violet it’s not violet,
but when we walk upon its flowers
we walk upon the sky.
If there were saints among trees,
jacaranda, you would be my saint
and I would place at your feet
the offering
of your own flowers.
Perhaps Cornelius Agrippa would have captured
in his mirror
this violet amethyst light
playing ruefully in the air
penetrating the shadows
having no form
because it is changeable
difficult to capture
like petals in the wind
being spirit
fluttering in the face of the world
with wings of no bird,
the mysterious
vehemence of this ubiquitous color
that flees staying
and fleeing stays.
Not being a stone
with the phantasmagoria of the stone,
not being a flower with the science of the flower.
Rain, cloud, space, nothing more.
I didn’t want to speak of the trees
as if they were people,
nor attribute to them my sensibilities,
so superior do I consider them.
Nor did I want to speak in the trees’ name
as if I had been one of them,
nor give them the tone of my voice,
so ineffable do I judge them.
I hoped to assume a different form
in order to speak of them.
To forget how I feel,
how I listen, how I see,
but that is as impossible
as asking a tree not to have freshness in its leaves,
nor growth in its roots,
nor shade, nor fragrance,
nor the swaying of its branches in the wind.