translated from the Spanish by Michael Martin Shea

1.

To write today is an emptiness—it’s in the form
or the passage, in a piece without belonging:
maximum intensity, duration.
Will there be here a dark subject, the shadow
totally glazed, assembling and removing
the expressionless threads of a cloud?
Teacher’s reprobation—
draw open the window, the days go on.

To write today is an emptiness.
I will choose to no longer search for more than the tradition of the hand
blessed by wax, the gradual decline.

The ghostly passage and the neutral point burst with horror
—absence of a style.
No longer me, nor before—
To write today is an emptiness, ochre, harsh.

2.

I will wait in the real sand,
the tangible form of rock,
in the transmutation of fate made from breath.

With words I feed the creation of time
—someone else can speak, someone else can write.
Liquid movements cycled by the marrow
of a false body.
The glass absorbs the sky.

I will wait in the sand, in the dust of the rock
—in the shadow of the dryness I erase them.
Soothe me with passivity.
Soothe me because I don’t exist.

3.

It’s eight at night
above the aquarium water
—unending day in the passing of sand.
What one wants from the air is a dream unfamiliar
with the cloth of shadows.

Unending day above the passing of sand,
like your eyes, like my gaze.

Here is the thirst of the impulses,
beach without memory where the likenesses speak,
and even so, sisters, they dissolve in mirages,
like your eyes, like my gaze.

Words occur beyond the object
gnawed by ancient tragedy and empty laughs,
splitting from the pages their sides.

The wanted earth burns the lips,
eight at night above the aquarium glass.
Far from thinking your folded eye, the voices distant.

4.

Things happen in other ways—
birth, that long mode without a room, in which I already cannot rummage,
time, surrounding me little by little,
above the brutal eye around my hand, throat, mouth,
not to remain but to double myself, more still,
with this gesture which casts me as your cause.

But what remains to be added is not this
but the word now barren of blood and thirst.
Insipid, dark—it’s from that place I’m not required:
it tolerates, suckles,
and changes the calm into youthful weakness.
The silence that searches for me,
that ties itself to my body.

To the light of day, to the shadow anchored,
without the quietness of rock, still weighted to memory,
a sign in the repose, passion in the change that carries
from one moment to another
and buries itself in the ice
—tooth or hump that they call me.

Things happen in other ways.
I’ve given nothing:
the stars in the storm, the word in the basin.

And this that spies, at the risk of expiring,
fetid soup in the orbit of another night,
it comes and falls—
not spun around, but going before you.

5.

Rigid bodies like branches collapse
to free themselves from the first dream,
to search in the turbid waters for the image
rolling itself in a curtain of algae
or to search for the imperfect in the naked
in order to write—the limit is the choice of night.

On the tip of the thread: serpent or ray.
It’s the thread that ties dawn to the bodies,
once they, rigid, collapse.

The blurry light that widens the edges,
ocean of all of the masks,
is the glass that collects your essence.

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