“And it was at that age…Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesmal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.”
5. “Between shadow and
space, between harnesses and virgins,
endowed with a singular
heart and fatal dreams,
impetuously pale, withered
in the forehead
and in mourning like an
angry widower every day of my life,
oh, for every drink of
invisible water I swallow drowsily
and with every sound I take
in, trembling,
I feel the same missing
thirst and the same cold fever,
an ear being born, an
indirect anguish,
as if thieves were arriving, or ghosts,
and inside a long, deep,
hollow shell,
like a humiliated waiter, like
a bell gone a bit hoarse,
like an old mirror, like the
smell of an empty house
where the guests come
back at night hopelessly drunk,
and there’s an odor of
clothes thrown on the floor,
and an absence of flowers
—or maybe somehow a
little less melancholic—
but the truth is, suddenly,
the wind lashing my chest,
the infinitely dense nights
dropped into my bedroom,
the noise of a day burning with sacrifice
demand what there is in me
of the prophetic, with melancholy
and there’s a banging of
objects that call without being answered,
and a restless motion, and
a muddled name.”