In eternity, no one imagines oneself eternal.
Here, in this state, I think I will last
beyond my years, that I will have
another chance to get back what I didn't do.
If to forgive is to forget, the worst awaits me.
I will be forgotten when redeemed.
Don't forgive me, God. Don’t forget me.
Oblivion never returns its hostages.
Clarity doesn’t repeat itself. Life snaps just once.
Fire is a nut that cannot be cracked with the hands.
The voice comes from the fire, which only grows if reckless.
There's no walking back after excessive burning.
I was cast too soon into the ashes.
We are reactionaries on the way back.
When I was going to meet you,
I risked shortcuts and unknown paths.
I believed I could leave through the entrance.
On returning, don't improvise.
My conversion is through fear,
praying on my knees before the revolver,
without turning aside,
not sure if it's a toy or real.
The wind bends. I don't touch my pockets,
in the folder and conscience,
no guitar brusque gesture,
the science of a crosshair
and the trigger rotating close
to the eardrum of the teeth.
Poured into God, together with my waste.
I will mislead you in the act of naming.
Better to withdraw in silence.
We sing in chorus like animals of the dark.
The eyelashes did not germinate.
There is a lack of planting in our mouths, vegetation in the nails, impressions and herbs in the chest.
We plead for bass and treble, ecstasy and wonder,
composing corner with the night.
To sing is not relief,
but to pull the bells
beyond our weight,
waking up the dome of doves.
We are smoke and wax,
slime and tile,
fog and rudder.
Winter invented us.
It doesn't matter if I hear you
or if you explode my ears of dew.
Does that which I cannot talk about die?
I will be isolated and reduced,
a photograph emptied of dates.
Family members will try to decipher who I was
and what flourished from the legacy.
I would be a stranger in the portrait
with bright eyes on old paper.
I write to be rewritten.
I walk in the warehouse of haze, tense,
under threat from the sun.
I chew leaves, tasting the air, the washed earth.
After death, everything can be read.
I see steps even in flight.
Your violence is tranquility.
There is no deeper fall
than not being the chosen one,
bitter the end of the line,
to be what remains for later,
that records friends
through newspaper obituaries,
that buries and withdraws into exile,
the rose crumbles to the touch
in the paleness of petals and candles,
inspecting every wrinkle
and infiltration of ivy between the veins,
never an adult to understand.
There is nothing natural about natural death.
To divorce yourself from the body, to tremble on holding
the legs, to accommodate yourself in the finite
of a bed and to lie down with the tumult
that comes from an empty tomb.
TRANSLATION BY ROSALIENE BACCHUS
