Monday tangles up with Tuesday
and a week with the whole year.
Time cannot be cut
with your tired scissors,
and all the names of the day
are washed away by the night.
No one can be called Pedro,
nor Rosa, nor María.
All of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain within rain.
I’ve been told of Venezuelas,
of Paraguays and of Chiles,
and I don’t know of what they speak:
I know the skin of the earth
and it has no last name.
When I lived among roots
they pleased me more than flowers,
and when I spoke to a stone
it rang out like a bell.
Springtime is so long
when it lasts all winter:
time has lost his shoes,
a year contains four centuries.
Every night when I sleep,
what am I called or not called?
And when I awake, who am I
if I was not myself while I slept?
What this means is that just
as we’re stepping foot in life,
just as we are newly being born,
let us not fill our mouths
with so many insecure names,
with so many sad labels,
with so many pompous letters,
with so much yours and so much mine,
with so much signing of papers.
I intend to confuse things,
to join them and newly birth them,
mix them up, undress them,
until the light of the world
has the oneness of the ocean,
a generous vast wholeness,
a fragrance that crackles.
Now if you’d leave me in peace.
Now if you’d get on without me.
I am going to close my eyes
And I only want five things,
five favorite roots.
One is love without end.
Second is to see autumn.
I cannot be without leaves
flying and returning to earth.
Third is grave winter,
the rain I loved, the caress
of a fire in a wilderness of cold.
In fourth place is summer
round like a watermelon.
The fifth thing is your eyes,
Matilde, my love, my beloved,
I would not sleep without your eyes,
I don’t want to be without your seeing me:
I’d trade springtime
for your gaze still upon me.
My friends, all of that is what I want.
Nearly nothing and nearly everything.
And now if you wish you may go.
So much have I lived that one day
you’ll have to will yourselves to forget me,
erasing the blackboard of me:
my heart was endless.
But just because I ask for silence
don’t go thinking I’m about to die:
it’s quite the contrary:
as it turns out I’m going to be lived.
It just so happens that I am and I keep being.
I will not be dying for within me
grains will grow,
first the kernels that break through
the earth to see light,
but mother earth is dark:
and inside me I am dark:
I am like a well in whose waters
the night sky leaves her stars
and goes on alone through the fields.
This is about my having lived so much
that I want to live another much.
Never have I felt such resonance,
never have I had so many kisses.
Now, as always, it is early.
The light takes flight with her bees.
Leave me alone with this day.
I raise my hand to be born.
The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All my becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.”
