REVERIE
I
November was almost over when I found you. The sky was blue and the trees so green. I had long been half-sleeping, tired of waiting for you, feeling you would never come. I said to everyone: look at my chest, see? My heart is livid, lifeless, rigid. And today, I say: look at my chest: my heart is red, sappy, awed.
II
Who is it whom I love? You shall never know. You will look into my eyes to discover him and see nothing but the glow of ecstasy. I will lock him that you may never imagine who he is in my heart, and there I will rock him, silently, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. I will give you my songs, but I will never give you his name. He lives within me like a dead man in his tomb, all mine, far from inquisitiveness, from indifference and wickedness.
III
Early this morning, as I rested, you came by my house. With short steps and a tight breath, lest I should wake, you slid by the edge of my balcony. I was asleep, but I saw you in dreams, silently passing by: you were pale and your eyes regarded me sadly, like the last time I saw you. When I woke up white clouds rushed in on you from behind.
IV
My enemies, if you exist, behold my surrendered heart. Come and hurt me. You will find me humble and grateful: I will kiss your fingers; I will caress the eyes that stared at me with hatred; I will speak the sweetest words you have ever heard.
V
In this twilight of spring I would fly, yes, I would fly. Were it not that my heart—burdened, swollen, pained, massive—filled my chest, restrained my movements, numbed my body, and kept me stuck to the soil where you live, oh Mine!
VI
Above all things I love your soul. Through the veil of your flesh I see it shine amid darkness: it engulfs me, transforms me, suffuses me, mesmerizes me. Then I speak to feel that I exist, for otherwise my tongue would become paralysed, my heart would cease to beat, my entire self would wither in astonishment.
PLENITUDE
XXIX
I love! I love! … I feel like dashing across the Earth, going round in a single run and back to the starting point. I’m not mad, though I seem so. My madness is divine and contagious. Stay away.
XXX
An icy, sharp wind engulfed me a moment ago as if to deprive me of something. Does it know, perchance, that I am suffused with love, and so it tries, eternal oblivion, to become laden with my persistence and warm with my tenderness? But I retorted: Is it not enough for you to sweep everything along, you vagrant? All my love is little for me; I am giving you nothing.
XXXI
Rose, divine rose balancing on the wind, still spattered with the scanty night rain. You are blessed in your placidity, on the sappy freshness of your stem, under the sweet sky of December. But not as much as me. You cannot look at him, and I can. If his hands rested upon your fleshiness, you would not recognise them, as I do, by their mere touch. If you heard his heart beating nearby, you would not know that it is his, as I do, by its mere sound.
XXXII
Listen: I was like a sleeping sea. You woke me up and the tempest broke out. I shake my waves, sink my ships, climb up to the sky and punish the stars, I am ashamed and hide among my folds, I run amok and kill my fish. Do not regard me with fear. You have wished it so.
XXXIII
I love you because you resemble no one. Because you are proud, like me. And because you offended me before loving me.
XXXIV
I’ve come down to the garden at first light in the morning. The thin dew moisture refreshes my soles, and my eyelids relax under the spring air’s sweetness. I see the rose trees in bloom, the snow-covered vine, the shifting black ant-line and the lemon tree laden with golden fruit. But I think: you are gold outside and sour inside! His heart is not like that: it’s sweet and beautiful inside out.
AGONY
LIII
A few times I suggested some absurd trips. “Let’s go,” I said to you, “where we can be alone and the climate is mild and men, good.” I’ll see you upon waking and we will have breakfast together. Then, we will go away barefoot, searching for quaint stones and odourless flowers. As I take a nap, lying on my hammock under the branches—black and rough tree bones sweetened by the smooth mercy of the leaves—I will sleep to dream you. When I wake up, even closer than in my dream, I’ll find you by my side. And at night you will leave me at my bedroom door.
LIV
Sitting on a bench—how long?—I dared not take your hands. On my spring dress’s blouse, my tears fell heavily at last. The fabric absorbed them in silence, right there, where the heart is.
LV
One afternoon, ambling under large trees, on a mattress of yellowish soil, as mellow as sifted flour, I happened to look into the sky. It was traversed by thin, immaterial white clouds, and I amused myself as I knitted, with them and on them, the lines of your face.
LVI
You were afraid of my mortal flesh and sought the immortal soul in it. To find it, your harsh words wounded me open. Then you leaned over them and breathed in, terrible, the smell of my blood.
LVII
I entrusted myself to you. I wanted to show you how depraved I was, to force you to love me depraved. I exaggerated my defects, my weaknesses, my dark actions, to joyfully tremble with the forgiveness I was forcing on you. Yet, for your noble forgiveness, listen, I would have suffered the most harrowing illness you suffered, the deepest shame that disgraced you, the longest exile you were imposed.
NIGHT
LXVII
You are not coming back. My entire being yearns for you, but you are not coming back. If you came back, my entire yearning being would reject you. From your mortal being I extract, now distant, the aeriform phantom that sees with your eyes and caresses with your hands, yet belongs not to you. It is mine, absolutely mine. I lock myself and him up in my room, and when no one, not even myself, hears, and when no one, not even myself, sees, and when no one, not even myself, knows, I hold the phantom in my arms, and in the ancient manner of the pendulum, long, stern and solemn, I rock the void…
Translated by Jorge Rafael Abuchedid
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