Nocturne and Elegy




If he asks for me, trace on the floor
a cross of silence and ash
over the impure name that I suffer.
If he asks for me, tell him I have died
and that I rot under an anthill.
Tell him that I’m an orange branch,
the simple weathervane of a tower.

Don’t tell him that I still cry
caressing the hollow of his absence
where his blind statue stays imprinted
as I await his body to return.
Flesh is a laurel that sings and suffers
and I will wait in vain under its shadow.
It’s already late.  I am a small mute fish.

If he asks for me give him these eyes,
these gray words, these fingers;
and the drop of blood on my handkerchief.
Tell him that I am lost, that I’ve become
a dark partridge, a false ring
at the bank of forgotten reeds:
tell him that I go from the saffron to the lily.

Tell him that I wanted to prolong his lips,
to inhabit the palace of his forehead.
To navigate a night in his hair.
To learn the color of his pupils
and extinguish myself smoothly in his chest,
sunken nightly, drowsy
in a murmur of veins and mutes.

Now I can’t see although I implore
the body that I wore in my affection.
A pink conch shell has come to me,
I stood immobile, broken, and detached.
If you doubt me believe in the wind,
look toward the North, ask the sky.
And they will tell you if I wait or darken.

Ah! If he asks tell him what you know.
Of me the olives will speak one day
when I am the eye of the moon,
unique over the forehead of the night,
divining shells of sand,
the nightingale suspended by a star
and the hypnotic love of the tides.

It’s true that I am sad, but I have
a smile planted in thyme,
I hid another smile in Saturn
and I don’t know where I’ve lost the other one.
It will be better if I wait until midnight,
for the lost odor of jasmine,
and in vigil of the roof, cold.

I don’t remember your selfless blood
nor that I placed thorns and worms
to bite your friendship of cloud and breeze.
I am not the ogre who spit in his water
nor he who pays in coin a tired love.
I am not he who frequents that house
presided over by a leech!

(There he goes with a bouquet of lilies
which an angel of turbid waves bleeds dry.)
I am not he who betrays the doves,
the children, the constellations . . .
I am a helpless green voice
who looks for and solicits its innocence
with the sweet whistle of a wounded shepherd.

I am a tree, the point of a needle,
a high equine gesture in balance;
the swallow crossing, the oiled
flight of an owl, the shock of a squirrel.
I am everything, minus that which
an index draws with mud on the walls
of brothels and cemeteries.

Everything, minus that which hides itself
under a dry mask of grass.
Everything, minus the flesh that procures
voluptuous serpent rings
encircling in a slow and viscous spiral.
I am that which you devote to me, which you invent
to bury my cry in the mist.

If he asks for me, tell him I inhabit
the acanthus and acacia leaf.
Or tell him, if you prefer, that I have died.
Give him my breath, my handkerchief;
my ghost in the nave of the mirror.
Perhaps I will cry in the laurel or search for
my remembrance in the form of a star.


Emilio Ballagas