8
(if the cold freezes you)
if the cold freezes you, don’t cozy up to the side of the coals transformed into ash. Get close to a heat that still keeps a trace of some circulatory system, because the ash is gasping for air, drowned in its own dust, and the dryness that it passes on, will suffocate you
24
(when there were only a few steps left)
when there were only a few steps left to leave behind, the last boundary of the institution where I had worked for twenty-six years, a huge magnolia tree fell to pieces behind me. I did not see it fall. I did not hear the impact on the ground. But the blow of its perfume opened my face in one slash, as if telling me goodbye
32
(summer is getting left behind)
summer is getting left behind. Its yellow lights are going under in another horizon. Forward and upward, winter gradually shows the edge of its imposing curtain of ice. On the shoulder of the highway, one glimpses a bundle (half closed, as of bones (and hairs of some animal: the still image also contains me, and the last light of the old sun over the ice extracts from our fur the best flashes
33
(out of breath we moved ahead)
out of breath we moved ahead, waiting for the star to look down and with a SINGLE RAY OF LIGHT measure all our effort. But its lidless eye, stayed stretched across, and unpressured. Unsheltered, we moved ahead (the sun beating down on our eyes), and in a crook of the road, OUR GUIDE tried to take his own life: managing it—halfway—he lost his eyes & his feet, he took shelter in another night quiet and permanent. Defeated, we moved ahead, from the grave—halfway—of the meaning of life. The sun beating down on our (useless) eyes, & the night awaiting us on our (unmoving) feet
39
(don’t say that this tree)
don’t say that this tree, reaching out above the door of my house, looks like death. Don’t say it. Don’t say that you see my silhouette beneath or behind, walled in by it, don’t say it. Because those summer days were happy, and memory likes to breathe. Don’t say that you don’t remember the image of the standing stone, shining beneath the sun, when the brilliance still wasn’t trying to empty out its thickness. Don’t say that you see the trunk of the tree at the door of my house, trying to get in, forcing a horizontal position that takes in my silhouette, as if I didn’t have a resting place, as if I had never had one
43
(sweeping from the future: sky)
sweeping from the future: sky, pistil and pollen, perfume and stem. THE GUST unburied, at a blow, the tiny seeds that were—barely—beginning to sprout beneath the grass
Initially translated by Linde M. Brocato, reworked by María Auxiliadora Álvarez
Poems from A Sun Behind Us / Un sol caído avanza (New York: Akashic Books, 2025)
