I’m absent from laughter
and everything happy men possess.
While blood flees like a deer
through every landscape
for no apparent reason,
as if believing that the most remote images
silence our thought.
Still upright, despite
those dark-rooted suns,
I approach your winged figure,
your little vertigos,
and teach you to watch
like only fish can,
in orbits unfamiliar to your hands.
I emerge -little god-
from the most secluded womb
to join you with a perfectly measured distance.

We share a certain gaze,
and an open door
to encumber our conversations;
leaning on the frame, gathered there
like the abandoned gather themselves,
nursing an ancient music
even greater than life and death.
And you revolt, known angel, anticipating the fall.

Truth prefers this behavior.
That’s how you come and go
and wrap yourself in the luminescence of old stars
so that I can watch your skeleton,
knowing full well that there’s nothing more beautiful
than the becoming of sea into bones.

In the end one gets used to
no one saying goodbye,
and to perceiving sound
in the palm of a hand,
like sea horses
sense love
as they caress each other’s fishbone spines.

Beautified in a drop of water
seen through thirst,
you come to know my first workdays.
The steep channels that led God
to unite snow, tree heart,
bile, dark resin,
indecision, pendulum, eternity,
and night through eyes.

Who could die like that cloud
that I watch, softly evaporate
white and airy to the firmament rising
on light, atmospheric wings.

Who could die like the star,
eclipsing a few moments, and then no more
to shine again, like her,
in other blue-clad firmaments!

Who could be aurora ray
and, in afternoon’s decline, diffuse
into twilight burning gold
the moribund light as it waves goodbye!

Who could be wilting flower
painlessly bending one’s chalice
and even pale and inert, shedding petals
and spilling ambrosia into the aura!

But I am no flower, no errant cloud,
No star of blinking worlds…
I have a heart, a caring soul,
pieces all, made to be torn out!

This is why I want to be weightless atom,
perfumed breath of breeze,
to fool suffering
and die exhaling grins.

That in your bosom no more, Nature,
death is a voluptuous fainting,
rather a pretty expression;
and not a single thing into eternal repose sinking.

In honor of the Chilean holiday, the Feast of St. Peter and Paul, we present this work by one of the great Chilean poets of the 20th century.

Beneath the white arch,
terrified of the blue winds,
I throw a glance
(like lips on their way to a kiss)
through the balustrade at the yellow ocean.

How it lives, the odour
of rosebush and orange after rain.

A cat — flower of the winter thistle —
electrifies itself, begins to sing;
flies look for smoke-blackened beams;
chickens cluck and shake out their underclothes;

and my heart, trying
to house its sorrow when all covering has been ripped to pieces,
goes barefoot, and blindly.