Jaime Sabines

Translated by W.S. Merwin

  • I don't know if for certain
  • The Lovers
  • I love you at ten in the morning

    • I don't know if for certain

    I don't know if 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).

    The Lovers

    The lovers say nothing.
    Love is the finest of the silences,
    the one that trembles most and is hardest to bear.
    The lovers are looking for something.
    The lovers are the ones who abandon,
    the ones who change, who forget.
    Their hearts tell them that they will never find.
    They don't find, they're looking.

    The lovers wander around like crazy people
    because they're alone, alone,
    surrendering, giving themselves to each moment,
    crying because they don't save love.
    They worry about love. The lovers
    live for the day, it's the best they can do, it's all they know.
    They're going away all the time,
    all the time, going somewhere else.
    They hope,
    not for anything in particular, they just hope.
    They know that whatever it is they will not find it.
    Love is the perpetual deferment,
    always the next step, the other, the other.
    The lovers are the insatiable ones,
    the ones who must always, fortunately, be alone.

    The lovers are the serpent in the story.
    They have snakes instead of arms.
    The veins in their necks swell
    like snakes too, suffocating them.
    The lovers can't sleep
    because if they do the worms ear them.

    They open their eyes in the dark
    and terror falls into them.

    They find scorpions under the sheet
    and their bed floats as though on a lake.

    The lovers are crazy, only crazy
    with no God and no devil.

    The lovers come out of their caves
    trembling, starving,
    chasing phantoms.
    They laugh at those who know all about it,
    who love forever, truly,
    at those who believe in love as an inexhaustible lamp.

    The lovers play at picking up water,
    tattooing smoke, at staying where they are.
    They play the long sad game of love.
    None of them will give up.
    The lovers are ashamed to reach any agreement.

    Empty, but empty from one rib to another,
    death ferments them behind the eyes,
    and on they go, they weep toward morning
    in the trains, and the roosters wake into sorrow.

    Sometimes a scent of newborn earth reaches them,
    of women sleeping with a hand on their sex, contented,
    of gentle streams, and kitchens.

    The lovers start singing between their lips
    a song that is not learned.
    And they go on crying, crying
    for beautiful life.

    I love you at ten in the morning

    I love you at ten in the morning, at eleven, at twelve noon. I love you with my whole soul and my whole body, sometimes, on rainy afternoon. But at two in the afternoon, or at three, when I start to think about the two of us, and you thinking about dinner or the day’s work, or the amusements you don’t have, I start to hate you with a dull hatred, with half of the hatred that I reserve for myself.

    Then I go back to loving you, when we go to bed and I feel that you are made for me, that in some way your knee and your belly are telling me that, that my hands are assuring me of that, and that there is nowhere I can come to or go to that is better than your body. The whole of you comes to meet me and for a moment we both disappear, we put ourselves into the mouth of God, until I tell you that I am hungry or sleepy.

    Every day I love you and hate you irreparable. And there are days, besides, there are hours, in which I don’t know you, in which you are as strange to me as somebody else’s wife. Men worry me, I worry about myself, my troubles bewilder me. Probably there is a long time when I don’t think about you at all. So you see. Who could love you less than I do, my love?

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