Poems

Brown and agile child, the sun which forms the fruitAnd ripens the grain and twists the seaweedHas made your happy body and your luminous eyesAnd given your mouth the smile of water. A black and anguished sun is entangled in the twigsOf your black mane when you hold out your arms.You play in the sun … Read more

We have lost even this twilight.No one saw us this evening hand in handwhile the blue night dropped on the world. I have seen from my windowthe fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops. Sometimes a piece of sunburned like a coin in my hand. I remembered you with my soul clenchedin that sadness … Read more

There are lone cemeteries,tombs full of soundless bones,the heart threading a tunnel,a dark, dark tunnel : like a wreck we die to the very core,as if drowning at the heartor collapsing inwards from skin to soul. There are corpses,clammy slabs for feet,there is death in the bones,like a pure sound,a bark without its dog,out of … Read more

Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because — because — I don’t know how to say it: a day is long and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep. Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because then the … Read more

Translated from the Spanish by Christopher Logue Drunk as drunk on turpentineFrom your open kisses,Your wet body wedgedBetween my wet body and the strakeOf our boat that is made of flowers,Feasted, we guide it – our fingersLike tallows adorned with yellow metal –Over the sky’s hot rim,The day’s last breath in our sails. Pinned by … Read more

Victory. It has come late, I had not learnthow to arrive, like the lily, at will,the white figure, that piercesthe motionless eternity of earth,pushing at clear, faint, form,till the hour strikes: that clay,with a white ray, or a spur of milk.Shedding of clothing, the thick darkness of soil,on whose cliff the fair flower advances,till the … Read more

You’ve asked me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet?I reply, the ocean knows this.You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent bell? What is it waiting for?I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?Study, study it, … Read more

Beloved of the rivers,beset By azure water and transparent drops,Like a tree of veins your spectre Of dark goddess biting apples: And then awakening naked To be tattoed by the rivers, And in the wet heights your head Filled the world with new dew. Water rose to your waist, You are made of wellsprings And … Read more

All those men were there inside,when she came in totally naked.They had been drinking: they began to spit.Newly come from the river, she knew nothing.She was a mermaid who had lost her way.The insults flowed down her gleaming flesh.Obscenities drowned her golden breasts.Not knowing tears, she did not weep tears.Not knowing clothes, she did not … Read more

Matilde, years or days sleeping, feverish, here or there, gazing off, twisting my spine, bleeding true blood, perhaps I awaken or am lost, sleeping: hospital beds, foreign windows, white uniforms of the silent walkers, the clumsiness of feet. And then, these journeys and my sea of renewal: your head on the pillow, your hands floating … Read more