MACHU PICCHU
(Dedicated to the critic Petru Poantă, for the “Preface”
he wrote to my book The Countenance and the Resemblance)
Today I have felt, near me, death raving in rebirth,
Like a docile and vaguely known steam
It called me gently to sit down in front of a white sheet,
At a quick competition of confessions (in prose or poetry)
With seven compulsory words.
It was strange that I did not know them,
But they seemed to have been thrust into me and called me
In a single voice, with everything that was more alive in me,
Come, said the steam, in violet idleness full of the light warmth
Of the artesian wells, like the silk of the Persian carpets,
Come and see the other half of the world,
The Isfahan seen by Balzac does not count anymore,
Today the covered bridges have gone dry inside as well,
(now it is the dry season) and they take much more after the cities
Of Darius (what remains from them and what the centuries have
carried beyond)
And they dream and await and dream that the seven forgotten words
Find the Inca Path with its zigzagged stairs, impossible to confound
And still lost in the jungle, they dream of reaching me
Near the hut of the Memorial Stone Caretaker,
From where, all of a sudden, the mystery becomes visible
From the round wall of the Temple of the Sun and then you can
Find them again in the elegant shade from the Temple of the Three Windows,
It is here that anything gets demagnetized
And some beings get carried by old, antique secrets,
Or maybe, if you are strong enough, climbing higher,
On the stairs behind the Sacristy,
You make them out into the breath of that crude intimacy hovering
Unreally, in the sharp silence, cut with infinite precision
Into the huge stones, exactly as I finally remember,
How the unique faces of the seven words were buried
In the storms from another genesis of the world.
Libros Libertad 