Salvador Novo


Beside your body

Beside your body wholly surrendered to mine,
beside your smooth shoulders where the ways of your embrace are born,
where are born your voice and glance, remote and clear,
I suddenly sensed the infinite hollow of his absence.
All these years that I miss him so,
like a climbing vine that clings from the wind,
I've sensed that he comes and goes with each contact,
and everyday I eagerly tear a message that holds nothing but a date,
and his name grandly grows, every time vibrating more profoundly,
because his voice was only for my ears,
because my eyes went blind when his were gone,
and my soul is like a huge desolate temple.
But this body of yours is a foreign god,
forged out of memories, reflection of myself,
soft from my smoothness, glorious from my desires,
a masque
statue I've raised in his memory.

 
Karin Rosenthal


Today your eyes have lost the stars they wore

Today your eyes have lost the stars they wore
And I am shipwrecked too and wan with waves
Who swim out unto your body’s far shore
Where my own voice can call the name I bore,
Where there is gold and azure, day that’s new,
Grainlike and ripe, perfected, silent too.
In you my solitude once more seeks grace—
In thought of you! This swift change which seeps o’er,
some muted passion which your glances wore
Have touched with fiercer fire my life a space.

Fast-fleeting, far, far foam—seaweed—my kiss
Could worlds create again across your eyes!
Naked the shore there, lone, but rich for bliss,
And back the stars would blaze where bleakness lies.

A flower—and made to bloom for ruin vainly!
A world of joy and dead by fate’s decree?
My gift—all fruit-ripe, grain—rich things to be
Which bitter suns like yours seek surely.


This intense perfume of your flesh

This intense perfume of your flesh
is nothing more than the world which the blue spheres
of your eyes move and displace,
nothing more than the earth and the blue rivers
of veins imprisoned in your arms.
In your anguished kiss are all the round oranges
you sacrificed on the edge of a garden
where life for all time to come broke off from mine.
So remote was the endless air that filled our breasts.
I pulled you from the earth by the drunken roots of your hands,
and entire I drank you down, oh perfect delicious fruit!
Forever now when the sun touches me
I must feel the rude contact of your flesh
born in the freshness of an unexpected dawn,
nourished in the caress of rivers as pure and clear as your embrace,
sweetened in the afternoon wind
that comes down from the mountains to join your breath
and ripened in the sun of your eighteen years,
warm for me who awaited it.


Karin Rosenthal


You, myself, dry like a defeated wind

You, myself, dry like a defeated wind
which only for a moment could hold in its arms the leaf
it wrenched from the trees,
how is it possible that nothing can move you now,
that no rain can crush you, no sun give back your weariness?
To be a purposeless transparency
above the limpid lakes of your gaze,
oh tempest, oh deluge of long ago!
If since then I seek an image of you that was mine alone,
if within my sterile hands I stifled
the last drop of your blood and my tears,
if since then the world has been indifferent,
in wastelands endless, and each new night
has grown like moss over the memory of your embrace,
how then in the new day can I have any breath but yours,
any but your impalpable arms among mine?

I weep like a mother who has replaced her only dead son.
I weep like the earth which twice has felt the same perfect fruit sprout with it.
I weep because you were destined to be my grief
and already now it is in the past that I belong to you.


Absence

K. Rosenthal

My only love and so wholly mine
Making desirable my days,
How well we both know what absence is
Since the flesh hinders us so always!

My hands to be sure have forgotten you
But my eyes can see you as I tell,
Whenever the world grows bitter for me
I shut them both then I see you well.

I never want to meet you again
Who are with me always, I do not care
How I shatter to pieces life which is yours
Which for me weaves this dream so fair.

Just as one day you said to me
that it is your living image I own,
Because daily I wash my eyes
With the tears wherein your memory shone.

One went away but it was not you,
My love whom the silences can claim,
If my two arms even and my mouth
Went away with the words the name.

This is not I, the other it is
Silent as usual but lasting for aye,
Just like this love so wholly mine
Which will go on with me till I die.


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