Cosas


                                             1



I love things I’ve never had
and others that I don’t have now:

I touch a quiet river
halted in chilly pastures,
that without wind shivered
in the orchard that was my orchard.

I watch it as I watched it:
it gives me strange thoughts,
and I play, slowly, with that water
as if with a fish or mystery.

                                         
                                             2


I think in a threshold where I left
happy steps that I no longer have,
and I see in that threshold an ulcer
filled with moss and silence.


                                            3


I search out a verse that I have lost,
that they taught me when I was seven.
There was a woman baking bread
and I see her sacred mouth.


                                          4


An aroma broken in gusts arrives;
I am very happy when I feel it;
this aroma is not of a great delicateness,
rather the odor of almond trees.


                                          5


My senses become children;
I search for a name and cannot figure it out,
and I smell the air and the places
searching out almond trees I cannot find . . .


                                         6


A river always sounds nearby.
It’s been forty years since I felt it.
It’s the singing of my blood
or better a rhythm that I was given.

Oh the river Elqui of my childhood
that I lean against and that I ford.
I’ve never lost it; chest to chest,
like two children, we have each other.

When I dream the mountain range,
I walk through gorges,
and I come listening to them, without respite,
a whistle almost an oath.


                                         7



I see the edge of the Pacific
purplish my archipelago,
and from an island there has remained with me
the acrid smell of a dead kingfisher . . .


                                       8



A back, a grave and sweet back,
ends the dream that I dream.
It is the end of my journey
and I am tired when I arrive.

It is a dead trunk or it is my father,
the vague, ashen back.
I don’t ask, I don’t disturb him.
I lay together, I am quiet and I sleep.


                                     9



I love a rock of Oaxaca
or Guatemala, to which I approach,
red and fixed like my face
whose crevice gives out a breath.

On going to sleep I stand naked;
I don’t know why I turn it over.
And maybe I’ve never had it
and its my sepulcher I see . . .



Gabriela Mistral