FERRATER, Gabriel

Room in fall

The Venetian blind, not quite closed, like

a scare held back before dropping,

does not separate us from the air. Look, thirty-seven

horizons open, straight and fragile,

but the heart forgets them. Without yearning,

the light is dieing on us that was honey-

colored, and that now has the color and smell of apples.

How slow, the world; how slow, the world; how slow,

the pain for the hours that go by

so hurriedly. Tell me, will you

remember this room?

"I like it very much.

Those voices of workers ... What are they?"

Masons:

a house is missing on the block.

"They sing,

and today I can't hear them. They shout, they laugh,

and today it seems strange to me that they are silent."

How slow,

the red leaves of the voices, how uncertain

when they come to cover us. Asleep,

the leaves of my kisses are covering

the shelters of your body, and while you forget

the high leaves of summer, the open days

without kisses, the body,

in its depth, remembers: your skin

is still half sun, half moon.


Dawn

The night goes away, another night, and the wing

of an immense airplance has placed itself

between the wide blue and the window, and I wonder

whether it's the faintest kind of green or silver, cold

as the insistent fineness of the knife scraping

the imposition of excessive life

off the uterus, or the light itself, as the boy's hand

opens: he's getting tired of making a fist to

aggravate his brothers, pretending it holds some

kind of treasure. He gives away his prey, and I know

it's not anything that wasn't in me yesterday

and disconsolate, and I feel cold looking at myself

another day, dried-out pit of a fruit, pulpless,

outside the night.

Translated by Johannes Beilharz