Close the shutters: the day recedes;
make flutes from yesteryear’s reeds
and don’t open, knock how they may:
they shout but have nothing to say.
Take cyclamen, pine-needles, the lily,
anemones out of the sea;
O woman whose wits are lost,
Listen, the water’s ghost…

Behind the large eyes the curved lips the curls
carved in relief on the gold cover of our existence
a dark spot that you see traveling like a fish
in the dawn calm of the sea:
a void everywhere with us.

— ‘Listen. There’s this too. In the moonlight
the statues sometimes bend like reeds
in the midst of ripe fruit — the statues;
and the flame becomes a cool oleander,
the flame that burns one, I mean.’

— ‘It’s just the light… shadows of the night.’

— ‘Maybe the night that split open, a blue pomegranate,
a dark breast, and filled you with stars,
cleaving time.

– George Seferis, Thrush

The houses I had they took away from me. The times
happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile;
sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds,
sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting
was good in my time, many felt the pellet;
the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters.

Ephemeral issue of a vicious daemon and a harsh fate,
why do you force me to speak of things that it would be better for you not to know.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface. There are epochs, however, when mankind, not satisfied with the present, yearning like the ploughman for the abyssal strata of time, thirsts for the virgin soil of time. Revolution in art inevitably leads to Classicism, not because David reaped the harvest of Robespierre, but because that is what the earth desires.

– Osip Mandelstam, ‘Word and Culture’

Cities of rooms convulse
my mind’s repose; a labyrinth
of connecting halls ajumble
with clutter, faces, sounds—
debris of flat eyes, hot breath
and memory in movie-clips collide.
Synapses crackle with
jazz riffs, laughter, poetry.
Adults abound, loping toward
enlightenment & retirement homes.

“You were always my mirror,
To see myself, I had to look at you.”

– julio cortázar