Have compassion, pious love, love that does not make us suffer endlessly, love of a single thought, do not say that you are pure, without masks, without a single stain. Allow me to have you entirely, be all, all mine—that form, that grace, that small pleasure of love that is your kiss, those hands, those divine eyes, that warm, white, shining, pleasant chest, even you yourself, your soul, for pity’s sake give it all to me. Do not hold back an atom of an atom, or I die; or if I keep living, only as your despicable slave, forgetting in the fog of affliction life’s purposes, the pleasure of my mind losing itself in insensitivity and my blind ambition.
11. The Fragile Shore
I am afraid of losing the marvel of your statue eyes and the accent that at night places the solitary rose of your breath on my cheek. I have the sorrow of being on this shore a branchless trunk, and what I feel most is not having the pulpy flower or clay for the worm of my suffering. If you are my hidden treasure, if you are my wet cross and pain, if I am the dog of your lordship, do not let me lose what I have won, and decorate the waters of your river with leaves from my autumn.
12. Walk with Me
Demented, walk with me. Only you have blessed, immortal soul, our habit of loving the winter night, wandering through the snow without witnesses. We will return to those old pleasures; dark clouds gather, shadowed mountains just like many years ago, until dying on the wild horizon in gigantic piled blocks, while moonlight hurries like a furtive nocturnal smile. Come, walk with me, we existed not long ago, but death has stolen our company like dawn steals the dew. One by one I carry the drops into the void until only two remain, but my feelings still flash, for in them you remain fixed. Do not claim my presence; can human love be so true? Can the flower of friendship die first and revive after many years? No. Even though tombs are bathed in tears, their stems are covered, vital sap has vanished, and green will never return—as sure as the final, inevitable horror, like the underground rooms where the dead and their reasons dwell. Relentless time separates all hearts.
13. The Weight of Conscious Life
Happy is the tree that is barely sensitive, and happier still the hard stone, for it no longer feels—since there is no greater pain than the pain of being alive, nor greater burden than conscious life. To be and know nothing, to be a sure path, and the fear of having been, and future terror, and the certain dread of being dead tomorrow, and suffering for life, and for shadow, and for what we do not know and barely suspect, and the flesh trembling with its fresh clusters, and the tomb waiting with its funereal branches, and not knowing where we are going nor whence we came.
14. Oceanic Eyes
Leaning into the evenings, I cast my sad nets into your oceanic eyes. There, the highest fire stretches and burns, my solitude spinning its arms like a shipwrecked sailor, making red signals over your absent eyes that ripple like the sea at the edge of a lighthouse. You only keep darkness, distant and mine female; from your gaze emerges at times the coast of dread. Leaning into the evenings, I cast my sad nets into that sea that shakes your oceanic eyes; nocturnal birds peck at the first stars that sparkle like my soul when I love you. Night gallops on her mare, scattering blue spikes over the countryside.
15. The Gardener of the Earth
I want to be, weeping, the gardener of the earth that you occupy and manure, early companion of the soul, feeding rains, snails, and organs. To my instrumentless pain, to the discouraged poppies, I will give your heart for food. So much pain gathers in my side that just aching hurts my very breath. A hard blow, an icy strike, an invisible and murderous axe, a brutal push has brought you down. There is no expanse greater than my wound; I weep for my misfortune and its assemblies, and I feel your death more than my life. I walk over stubble of the dead, and without anyone’s warmth, and without consolation, I go from my heart to my affairs. Early death took flight, early dawn arose early, early you are rolling on the ground—I do not forgive enamored death, I do not forgive inattentive life, I do not forgive the earth or nothingness. In my hands I carry a storm of stones, lightning, and strident axes, thirsty for catastrophes and hungry. I want to dig the earth with my teeth, I want to pull the earth apart, piece by piece, with dry and hot bites. I want to mine the earth until I find you and kiss your noble skull, and un-love you, and return you. You will return to my orchard and my fig tree; by the high scaffolds of flowers, your soul will chirp with honey in angelic waxes, and you will return to the lull of lovers’ fences, labradores. You will gladden the shadow of my eyebrows, and your blood will go everywhere disputing your sweetheart and the bees. Your heart, once third-rate but now worn, calls to a field of frothy almonds, my greedy lover’s voice. To the winged souls of the roses, of the almond tree of cream, I require you, because we have many things to talk about, early soul companion, companion.
16. Lightning and Storm
Your eyes are the homeland of lightning and tear, silence that speaks storms without wind, waveless sea, imprisoned birds, dormant golden foxes, impious topazes like truth, autumn in a clearing of the forest where light sings on the shoulder of a tree and all leaves are birds. A beach that the morning finds constellated with eyes, a head of fiery fruits, a lie that nourishes, mirrors of this world, doors of the beyond, calm pulsation of the absolute midday sea that blinks to…
17. Naked Earth
To see you naked is to remember the earth, the smooth, clean earth of horses, the earth without a reed, pure form closed to the future with a silver finish. To see you naked is to understand the longing of the rain that seeks a weak waist, or the fever of the sea of immense visage without finding the light of its cheek. Blood will sound through the bedrooms and will come with a flashing sword, but you will not know where it hides—in the heart of a toad or a violet. Your womb is a struggle of roots, your lips are a contourless dawn under the warm roses of the bed, the dead groan waiting their turn.
18. Never Past, Always Future
You know so much about me that I myself would like to repeat with your lips my own poetry, choosing a passage from my early life—a kite on the beach combed by Sofia. I do not have to wait or say “wait,” to see in the memory of melancholy the pine groves of Ibiza, the hidden trench, the slow dawn without day arriving. And then, love, and then see that life advances, full of open years and full of endless colors, not closed to the sun by any wall. You know well that hope does not die in me, that years in me are not leaves, but flowers, that I am never the past, but always the future.
19. Blessed Be the Day
Blessed be the year, the point, the day, the season, the place, the month, the hour, and the country in which her enchanting gaze chained itself to my soul. Blessed be the sweetest persistence of surrendering to that love that dwells in my soul, and the bow and arrows whose open wounds I still feel. Blessed be the words with which I sing the name of my beloved and my torment, my longings, my sighs, and my weeping. And blessed be my verses and my art, for they exalt her, and finally my thought, since she alone shares it.
20. Resignation
I have renounced you, it was not possible, they were vapors of fantasy; they are fictions that sometimes give the inaccessible a proximity of distance. I stayed watching as the river grew pregnant with the star, I plunged my mad hands toward it, and I knew the star was up above. I have renounced you serenely, as the criminal renounces God; I have renounced you like the beggar who does not let an old friend see him, like one watching large ships depart toward impossible and yearned-for continents. Like the dog that turns off its loving brightness when a big dog bares its teeth at him, like the sailor renouncing the port and the wandering ship renouncing the beacon, and like the blind man beside the open book and the poor child before the expensive toy. I have renounced you like the madman renounces the word his mouth pronounces, like those autumn scoundrels with static eyes and empty hands who blur their renunciation by blowing on the glass in the shop windows of confectionery stores. I have renounced you, and at every instant we renounce a little of what we once loved, and in the end, how many times does waning yearning ask for a piece of what we once were? I am going toward my own level, I am already calm; when I renounce everything, I will be my own master, breaking apart laces, I will return to the thread—renunciation, that return journey from the dream.
21. Velocity of Earth
I only wanted to be alive to love you on this swift earth, here by your side, following the flight of this sphere that spins behind a too-remote sun. Be what time allows us, given by the gods or by chance, be what remains of glow in our hesitant lamp—my desire is here, not in another world, next to your hands, your eyes, and your laughter, next to the trees and the wind that accompany your step through the world. Whoever it may be who hastens the stars and makes us be born or un-born, whoever it may be who joins our bodies even though this lightning lasts nothing and the swift earth erases our dream.
22. For You I Live and Die
Written in my soul is your gesture, and whatever I desire to write of you, you alone wrote it, I read it. So much so that I guard myself in this—in this I am and will always be, since even though everything I see in you does not fit within me, from so much good what I do not understand I believe, taking faith already as a presumption. I was born only to love you, my soul has cut you to its measure, by habit of the soul itself I love you, whatever I have I confess it upon seeing you; for you I was born, for you I have life, for you I must die, and for you I die.
23. Contradictions of Desire
I seek a lover for the one who leaves me ungrateful; I leave the ingrate for the one who follows me loving. Constant, I adore the one who mistreats my love; I mistreat the one who constantly seeks my love. The one I treat with love I find a diamond, and I am a diamond to the one who treats me with love. I want to see the one who kills me triumph, and I kill the one who wants to see me triumph. If to this payment my desire suffers, if I anger that one’s sense of honor—in both ways I see myself as unhappy. But I choose as a better match to be the violent employment of one I do not want, rather than the vile spoil of one who does not want me.
24. Flowing Body
Happy body flowing between my hands, beloved face where I contemplate the world, where graceful fugitive birds copy themselves flying to the region where nothing is forgotten. Your external form, diamond or hard ruby, brilliance of a sun dazzling in my hands, crater that summons me with its intimate music, with that un-decipherable call of your teeth. I die because I hurl myself, because I want to die, because I want to live in the fire; because this outside air is not mine, but the hot breath that, if I close, burns and gilds my lips from a depth. Let me look, dyed with love, reddened the face by your purplish life; let me look at the deep clamor of your entrails, where I die and renounce living forever. I want love, hour, death; I want to die completely, I want to be you, that roaring blood that, watering enclosed beautiful extreme members, thus feels the beautiful limits of life. This kiss on your lips like a slow thorn, like a sea made a mirror, like the shine of a wing, is still some hands, a reviewing of your crunchy hair, a crackling of banded light, light or mortal sword that threatens upon my neck, but will never be able to destroy the unity of this world.
25. Slumber and Pursuit
You will never understand how much I love you because you sleep in me and are fast asleep. I hide you, weeping, pursued by a voice of penetrating steel, a norm that agitates flesh and morning star alike, already piercing my grieving chest, and murky words have bitten the wings of your severe spirit. A group of people jump in the gardens awaiting your body and my agony on horses of light and green manes, but keep sleeping, my life; hear my broken blood in the violins, look—they are still lying in wait for us.
26. Total Surrender
Already I gave myself entirely, and in such a way I have exchanged that my beloved is for me and I am for my beloved. When the sweet odor breathed and left me wounded, in the arms of love my soul remained surrendered and, gaining new life, in such a way I have exchanged that my beloved is for me and I am for my beloved. And he hit me with a feathered arrow of love, and my soul was made one with its Creator; I no longer want another love, for I have given myself to my God, and my beloved is for me and I am for my beloved.
27. Oranges and Lemons
Reclined on the grass, a girl and a boy eat oranges, exchange kisses as waves exchange their foams. Reclined on the beach, a girl and a boy eat lemons, exchange kisses as clouds exchange foams. Reclined beneath the earth, a girl and a boy do not say anything, do not kiss, exchange silence for silence.
28. First Love
Beloved heart, I believe the young and passionate priest, when pulling for the first time from the hidden sanctuary his God secluded in the Eucharist and eating the bread and drinking the terrible wine, did not feel a terror as terrible as the one I felt when my enamored eyes crashed into yours for the first time, all night before kneeling at your feet until you grew tired of my passion. Ah, if you had liked me less and loved me more in those summer days of joy and rain, I would not have been the heir of sadness nor a lackey in the house of pain. Even so, though repentance, the white-faced servant of youth, steps on my heels with its retinue, I am glad to have loved you. Think of all the suns that turned into a blue Veronica.
29. Immortal Yearning
Tell me, friend, the cause of this ardent, pure, immortal yearning in me to suspend myself on your lip eternally and immerse myself in your being and the pleasant ambiance of your spotless soul. To receive in past time, a different time, our existence was not of a single being; perhaps the focus of an extinct planet gave nest to our love within its precinct in days we saw forever flee. You, just like me—yes, you have felt in your chest the sweetest heartbeat with which passion announces its fire. Let us both love each other, and soon we will happily take flight to that sky where once again we will be like God.
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