MY EYES PRACTICED on the sacred morning’s shadows and I learned to tell them apart by their darkness and their light

they seemed fashioned from penumbra and time and to be perishable or perfectible depending on the sun’s brightness and the location of beings and things

leading a perilous existence where the chance encounters that caused them to shimmer destroyed them

although some lasted beyond the day, for when nightfall came another light was lit next to the object that cast them, causing them to move slightly

some were very limpid and silence encompassed them in a clarity like an expanse of water that seemed to bathe them

my eyes ran over them, whether they were standing, lying down, or bending over as if to drink drops of light from the sun-drenched grass and among them my being composed its song

shadows, I thought, confer reality on objects by serving as their negatives or ghosts and dragging themselves across the floor or sliding down the wall as insubstantial doubles; there’s something servile about them, or inscrutably humble

they are the secret world, the counterweight, and the other landscape of the radiant day

I could tell the age of some and whether they were newly born or old by their condition on the dust and others were so riddled with holes that they were pale remains or ruins of shadows

on them the day narrated its variety, displayed its temperature, and revealed the hour

and suddenly in the afternoon there were unending shadows singing on the ground at the same time

spilled next to unending beings and things in the quiet landscape singing at the foot of a mountain or beside a black dog or a white chair or a little girl

here and there pointy and round in silent music

they intertwined, they intermingled, they piled up or, terribly solitary,

were cast by the root of a lone tree on the hill

or they walked at a man’s feet like an anchor to keep him from flying off the earth

and to remind him at every moment of his ghost

there were shadows of mountains and of clouds on mountains

fleeting shadows of insects

and shadows racing among horses’ feet

green shadows of willows swaying in the water

and shadows of a sparrow that shrink as the bird soars

and once it is in the air open out their wings flying over the ground

trees and beings had their voice on earth and their duration on a wall

and I

made my poem

and I recited it trembling.