Billie Dee's
Electronic Poetry
Anthology
Jaime Sabines
Descanse en Paz
Jaime Sabines
19 de Marzo de 1999
Please sign my guestbook
The Moon
You can take the moon by the spoonful
or in capsules every two hours.
It's useful as a hypnotic and sedative
and besides it relieves
those who have had too much philosophy.
A piece of moon in your purse
works better than a rabbit's foot.
Helps you find a lover
or get rich without anyone knowing,
and it staves off doctors and clinics.
You can give it to children like candy
when they've not gone to sleep,
and a few drops of moon in the eyes of the old
helps them to die in peace.
Put a new leaf of moon
under your pillow
and you'll see what you want to.
Always carry a little bottle of air of the moon
to keep you from drowning.
Give the key to the moon
to prisoners and the disappointed.
For those who are sentenced to death
and for those who are sentenced to life
there is no better tonic than the moon
in precise and regular doses.
-- Poemas sueltos, 1981, trans. W. S. Merwin
(untitled)
From the blue and black bodies
that walk at times through my soul
come voices and signs that someone interprets.
It's dark as the sun
this desire. Mysterious and grave
as an ant dragging away the wing of a butterfly
or as the yes we say when things ask us
-- do you want to live?
-- Recuento de poemas, 1961, trans. W. S. Merwin
(untitled)
I don't know it for certain, but I imagine
that a man and a woman
fall in love one day,
little by little they come to be alone
something in each heart tells them that they are alone,
alone on the earth they enter each other,
they go on killing each other.
It all happens in silence. The way
light happens in the eye.
Love unites bodies.
They go on filling each other with silence.
One day they wake up, over their arms,
Then they think they know the whole thing.
They see themselves naked and they know the whole thing.
(I'm not sure about this. I imagine it).
--Horal, 1950, trans. W. S. Merwin
(untitled)
I'm worried about the television. Its images, ultimately, are distorted. The faces are stretched until they're weird, or they shrink, or they shimmer out of focus and then turn into a monstrous game of invented faces, beams, lights and shadows, as in a nightmare. The words are perfectly distinct and the music and the sound effects, but they don't correspond to any reality. They're delayed, or they're too early, superimposed on the features that appear to be there.
I'm told that a repair man could fix it in two or three days, but I'm against that. I don't want violence. They'd put their hands inside there, take it apart, stick sinister things into it, risky transplants that might not take. I would never be itself again.
I really hope it gets over this. Because now it has a terrible temperature, a headache, awful nausea, which give it the dreams that we're watching.
-- Maltiempo, 1972, trans. W. S. Merwin
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