Fifteen coins

Fifteen coins

An oriental poet

A hundred autumns I've looked on
thy tenuous disk.
A hundred autumns I've looked on
thy island-sheltering bow.
A hundred autumns my lips
have never been less silent.

The desert

Space without time.
Moon and sand are one color.
Now, now exactly,
the men of Metaurus die and Trafalgar.

Rains

In what other day, what Carthaginian yards,
falls this rain?

Asterion

Each year pays me tribute of human food
and there is water in the well.
Knot of stony roads am I.
What can I complain of?
Afternoons
the bull's head weighs on me a little.

A minor poet

The end is oblivion.
I've arrived early.

Genesis iv, 8

In the first desert it was.
Two arms cast a great stone.
No cry. Blood.
For the first time death.
Was I Abel or Cain?

Northumbria, A.D. 900

By sunup let wolves despoil him;
the sword is the shortest way.

Miguel de Cervantes

Stars cruel and propitious
oversaw my genesis;
to the latter I owe the jail
I dreamed Quixote in.

The West

Alley the last with sundown.
Inauguration of the pampa,
of death.

Estancia El Retiro

Time plays without chessmen
here. A crackling twig
bites night. The plain outside
dust and dreams by the league spills.
Shades both, copyists
of shades: Heraclitus and Gautama.

The prisoner

File.
First of the iron doors.
Someday free.

Macbeth

Our acts go their
neverending way.
A king I killed so Shakespeare
would have a tragedy.

Eternities

The serpent who girds the sea, the sea,
the repeated oar of Jason, Sigurd's young sword.
Only those things last in time
that have never been.

Edgar Allan Poe

The dreams I've had. The pit and the pendulum.
The man of the crowd. Ligeia...
And this one.

The spy

In publicly lit battles
others gave their lives
marble remembers.
I gave something else.
I wandered dark in cities I hate.
Forswore myself,
betrayed who thought they were friends,
bought souls,
cursed my country,
accepted infamy.