Silvina Ocampo
Page 4
my girlish sadness grew heavier:
the horses wounded by lightning,
transformed into black skeletons,
I foresaw them in coming storms
or else dying in the hard earth
unable to find clean watering holes,
to discover the dawn’s caress.
And the hum of the cars moving off,
in the circular night carrying
shipments of feed, brought me
to remote and future places
in the quiet province among the villas,
crossed by roads among ribbons
of rosebushes clinging to the walls.
With the fluttering transparency of a veil
the future revealed names to me,
faces before having known them,
paths before having traveled them.
I saw things transformed
by eager time, re-formed.
I could remember only the future:
how my house was going to be, not as it was,
the boys already with faces of men,
the rosebuds withered,
the absent vine blooming.
I could see the people dead
who were about to die, and those anxious zones
in my memories of the future
I never communicated to anyone.
Mysterious phrases silenced me.
I was quiet and I liked to hear
those who remembered the past
(that realm prohibited to me).
I only remembered the future!
Sometimes I tried to modify
the sad parts of the future, in vain:
I couldn’t bring the summer rains
and my parents lost their crops,
nor could I make my cousin love
that boy who was in love with her.
I mustn’t think so quickly,
I’d tell myself, but my thoughts
were arrows that made me bleed
like Saint Sebastian in his agony,
swept with rapture in the engravings.
I tried to invent beautiful things,
destinies and affectionate people,
but I recognized clearly
the essential difference that existed
between the forecast of the future
and the invention that was mine alone.
Those images of the future
were unmistakable since they arrived
with the fragrance of plants when it rains.
They were not vague like others. They grew larger.
Seeing them, I always heard clearly
the rustle of the wind rising.
In the distance glass shattered,
a frozen pane of glass and very high up
whose pieces have always managed
with mysterious and liquid coolness
to sprinkle a side of my face.
Since I was a child I’ve been gentle and industrious.
I liked history and grammar
and in the square among flowers
the peaceful enigmatic shade of the fountain.
I embroidered sky-blue daisies
on a tablecloth praised by visitors
while they kindly watch me die.
Once I scared myself imagining
the figure of the devil who’d come
from a neighbor’s house and looked at me
with his arms crossed over his chest.
I was surprised that he was so short,
that he seemed a man forsaken,
and after passing restless days
awaiting the horror of his arrival,
nervous and trembling, desperate
I found one day in that same house
(now at last I can remember it)
in a book of religious tales
the same devil pale and battered.
Some music cannot be sung:
like infinite loves
cloistered is the recollection of its rites.
But now I have penetrated your memory,
oh Gabriel, whose surprise dazzles me,
I waited for this moment to see you
(this moment, the end now of my story).
I knew you long before meeting you:
already I foresaw how I was going to forget you,
and I tried in vain to avoid your encounter.
I was forgetting you as I led you by the hand.
Your soft golden hair illuminates
a song of stars and death.
I corrected your homework, your dictations
with the felicity of your glance.
I knew our dialogues of love
would be forgotten. Weary,
I left your side without memories...
I sought your face in the golden grains,
in other youths through whom I weep for you,
among heavenly rains, among altars,
in photographs of the sea.
Although I’m alone now I don’t miss you.
A memory of love is infinite—
it can sustain the space between my arms.
I carry you in the rose of a thousand snares,
in the conformation of my desires,
in the seraphic passion of the dawn,
in the chosen and venerated flower,
in the happy vision of my outings.
And it’s only here in death I’ll find
the dazzling truth of love.
Already I see it arriving. Oh shiny
vine of my days, how the sweet
shade waits...
Epitaph for the Proud One
Don’t be afraid to die in vain
like a sad dahlia in summer.
Neither death nor worms dared
devour my daily body.
As Diocletian loved his gardens,
I love these precincts. Come, brother,
among the dead I am the most human.
Epitaph for a Jealous Woman
And tomorrow who will deign to come
visit these gardens, captive like me,
and then include you in final verses
following the footpaths from your forms.
Who will be loved in your breast, beloved, faraway,
after having been joined to your reflections.
Oh, to whom will you speak of me, beloved,
and who will see that lover’s light
by which I die now being dead
from this life of the dead that is not certain.
On nights in the cool golden world,
among ferns and hydrangeas along a river,
with what interlocutor will you love
tropical seashores.
At the end of the day whom will you reproach,
for the jealousy, the ineffectual grief,
and that baleful circumspect glance,
so cherished, at love’s beginnings.
Epitaph for a House
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
Tennyson, “In Memoriam”
Approach my shadow slowly,
look at the bronze gold of my flowers
and in the winter garden the putti
in the mirror of leaves, persevere.
Listen to the ancient noise of my doors,
the elevator, the rain that beats upon
skylight windows, the roof terrace
and the patio that hears the silent bells.
Listen in my lost vestibules
to the forms of the names that were heard
moving in the time they lived,
that furniture fitted with slipcovers,
and the black upright piano
sounding its chords in the evening
as on a quiet lake along whose edge
the faltering voice of time is heard.
Consider one by one my window blinds,
opening and closing through the day
upon the lofty sky and t
he shaded wall.
Consider my moldings: they are human.
Contemplate the quiet parlor ceiling,
and in a radiant picture the lady
with a strange hand who courts
the innocent glance and signals
suppertime. Gently
breathe in my vague odors
risen from the carpet and the floors,
from the marble and the indifferent iron.
Contemplate one by one each face
that looked into the mirrors on my doors,
the heads of hair, all their reflections
and the joy that pain prepares.
Silently, go through my rooms.
Ah, no one is there, and the noonday sun
pierces the windows with melancholy.
What darkness with grainy light
follows your steps into my clarity!
In the farthest room, who awaits you
that your presentiment despairs!
Perhaps there is someone in my solitude.
Why do you so fear it if only
in your dreams it exists, that dark instant
of this ancient mansion, shuddering,
where a nameless ghost persists.
Poems of Desperate Love
(Poemas de amor desesperado, 1949)
Song
Oh, nothing, nothing is mine,
not the tone of my voice, nor my absent hands,
nor my distant arms!
I have received it all. Oh, nothing, nothing is mine.
I am like the reflections of a gloomy lake
or the echo of voices at the bottom of a blue
well when it has rained.
I have received it all:
like water or glass
that turns into anything,
into smoke, into a spiral,
into a building, a fish, a stone, a rose.
I am different from me, so different,
like some people when they are in society.
I am all the places I have loved in my life.
I am the woman I hated most,
and the perfume that wounded me one night
with decrees of an uncertain destiny.
I am the shadows that entered a car,
the luminosity of a port,
the secret embraces hidden in the eyes.
I am the knife of jealousy,
and the aches red with wounds.
Of the long eager glances I am the sparkle.
I am the voice I heard behind the blinds,
the light, the air above the cypress trees.
I am all the words that I adored
on the lips, in the books that I admired.
I am the greyhound that fled in the distance,
the solitary branch among the branches.
I am the happiness of a day,
the whisper of the flames.
I am the poverty of naked feet,
with children going silently away.
I am what they did not tell me and I knew.
Oh, I wanted everything to be mine!
I am everything I have already lost.
But everything’s elusive like the wind and the river,
like the golden summer flowers
that die in your hands.
I am everything, but nothing, nothing is mine,
not the pain, nor the joy, nor the terror,
not even the words of my song.
Memory of the Rains
How often the early-morning rains led me
happily along their paths, slowly dreaming,
to the crystal of the fields, among rows of pines,
seeking the favors of an astonishing light;
how often I saw them restore the extinct
windows, amid trees lost in the pure
tumult of their waves, that tied the ribbons
of the memories inhabiting their transparent walls.
Dazzled, I heard them hitting the skylights
with the soft insistence that precedes lightning
while in the leaves glittered the liquid
jewels that bathed the flowers and stems.
Enchanting the garden with sweet distances
in their murmur I always heard the echo of a piano
and discovered in the form of their tapestries
a deep greenhouse, heavenly in summer,
the columns of a temple with Asian statues,
packs of hounds descending to the foot of a slope,
a Mercury among plane trees and ecstatic fragrances
that expired wildly in the night.
I saw in their most turbid patterns the ancient floods
that enclosed trees, towers and men,
nascent cities and blond wheatfields
in muddy graves that bore no names;
and in the most detailed rains, alone, predestined,
the favorite names whirled in circles
until they found in gentle loving meters
the verses remembered, the verses promised.
Dance
Dizzy maze of mirrors
where the waves of the steps make love
transforming into swans slow arms
of gold, of ice, of water, of reflections.
Beloved face of the music
that speaks without voice and without words sings
in a center of clouds rousing
the mysteries of a magical plan.
Circle of incessant movements
sparkling among paper garlands.
Prefigured love of the lovers
who link thoughts with their hands.
Distance caressed by wings
of light as it rises and bends
like the flight of the bird illuminating
the color of its eager stops.
Constant sparkle tremulous and fertile
that endures in the ephemeral and varies
in the rites of sorrow and joy
upon the pale atriums of the world.
Apocalypse
If the constancy of the dawn ceases
and one day the sun doesn’t rise and death comes
to the punctual splendor that announced it,
if in the marbled water
the heavenly memory of the star
upon a dark night doesn’t shine forever,
if a light tremor of wings in the trees
marks the silence of the birds,
if the night no longer soothes like balm
and becomes an inferno of water and mud,
if the pansy doesn’t open its corolla,
if the stubborn vine dies,
if the fruit and fragrance of the roses
vanishes in the deep gardens,
we will think we are still dreaming:
we will recall similar days
that we could not share with anyone,
days when the pain in our eyes
placed the image of the apocalypse.
Elegy for the Demolished Grove
Porticos, infernal edifices,
snakes adorned with leaves
that the hands of the Furies sculpted
in the wood of sweet plants.
Your masks don’t scare me, violence,
these trees are what I love.
They are angelic mansions of birds,
precincts for afternoon naps,
they are the roots of the pure hours,
the sieve of the rains, of the moon,
the galleries of lofty nights,
the most faithful illustrations of Paradise.
What lucky shadows have been lost,
what nocturnal songs, what joys
of darkness, of murmuring flights
not of light in the memory.
These trees are also mortal:
in the ancient language of plants
they spoke to the most sentient beings,
to those who were happy, to the sorrowful,
to those who contemplated
in their leaves
the complicated face of love.
Torches, domes of the stars,
swings for the birds, the elves,
deep tabernacles of the breezes,
columns of the moon, casuarinas,
eucalyptuses benign and tortured
that have attended every dawn:
these are the very trees that speak to me,
these that lie injured
in the hot mud of the paths
improvising in vain long bridges
over the afternoon’s anthills,
over the escaping vine.
Oh Aristaeus, weep in these verses,
as when the bees died
in the burning hands of the nymphs
who avenged Eurydice and Orpheus.
Plunging it into the roses of its labyrinths,
a cyclone has destroyed the grove.
Pale incestuous daughter of Cinyras,
hiding your crime in Arabia;
Heliades, the crying of the leaves,
the light of your green eyes
is visible in the dark grasses;
your robes sow the dew.
Daphne, remember among the laurels
to cry the purple sorrows
of these plants that are more beautiful
in my province than spikenards and irises.
See how I kiss the injured branches
that my lips didn’t think to reach
except in intrepid faraway dreams,
in a lighter world, in other forests,
in a Paradise of thoughts
that the ecstatic glance contains.
See the rosy mist, the horizon
with its veils distancing the dove,
the shiny pomegranates, the offerings
of leafless mallows, the violets,
and in the mud the birds that have died,
their wings voluptuously stiff,
the fruits of the pine trees, the seeds,
the April sun as through ice,
the lacerated trunk, the bark,
over the gleaming rose, the sky.
Oh fraternal trees, the Furies
stalk us, sullen and attentive.
The same light illuminates us all,
protects us, leaves us united, alone.
The Fates who have woven destinies
with death enrich our life.
In grottoes of leaves and shadows,
birds more learned than the nightingale
enchant the mansions of these fields
where the musical silence is heard.
Time’s garlands are growing,
nothing stops them in their scope.
The subterranean forests of roots
adapt and flow like rivers.
When we die, trees, your attentive
fronds seem to sadden,
and a placid hum of beehives
is like the expression of our weeping.
The palms make grave movements
and impart consciousness to the flowers,
they lean upon the wind, at the windows,