Memory II
Ephesos
He spoke sitting on what looked like
the marble remnant of an ancient gate;
endless and empty the plain to the right to the left
the shadows descended from the mountain.
‘The poem is everywhere. Your voice
sometimes appears on its side
like a dolphin that for a while keeps company
to the sailing boat in the sunshine and
then vanishes again. The poem is everywhere
like the wings of the wind in the wind
that touched the gull’s wings for a single moment.
Same as our lives and different too, as a woman’s
face changes and yet it remains the same
after she undresses. The one who has loved
knows this; in the light of other people
the world decays; but you, remember Hades
and Dionysus are the same.’
He said, and then he took the long road
that leads to the old harbor, now sunk
over there in the rushes. At twilight,
you’d speak about the death of an animal,
so naked. I still remember;
that he traveled to Ionian shores, to empty conches of theaters
where only the lizard crawls over the dry stone,
and I asked him: ‘Will they get filled again sometime?’
And he answered: ‘Perhaps, at the time of death.’
And he ran to the orchestra yelling:
‘Let me hear my brother!’
And the silence around us was merciless
and not incised on the glass of the blue.
Libros Libertad 