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Susana Bombal

Tall and proud in the evening,
she crosses the chaste garden and is
in the pure irreversible instant
of this garden and her tall silent
image. Here and now,
but also in an antique
Ur of the Chaldees twilight
or descending the slow steps
of a temple, innumerable dust
of the planet once stone and splendor,
or discerning the magic alphabet
of antipodean stars
or smelling a rose in England.
Where music is she is, light
blue, in Greek hexameter,
in our loneliness which looks for her,
reflected in the fountains,
in the marble of time, a sword,
in a terrace quietude
looking at garden sunsets.

Behind myth and mask
her soul alone.