Delphi, Greece - 20071. “A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.”
2. “Ancient night and disordered salt
pound the walls of my house:
the shadow is alone, the sky
is now a throb of the ocean,
and sky and shadow explode.”
3. “And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream. / Love and pain and work should all sleep, now. / The night turns on its invisible wheels, / and you are pure beside me as a sleeping ember.”
4. “And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesmal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.”
5. “Between shadow and
space, between harnesses and virgins,
endowed with a singular
heart and fatal dreams,
impetuously pale, withered
in the forehead
and in mourning like an
angry widower every day of my life,
oh, for every drink of
invisible water I swallow drowsily
and with every sound I take
in, trembling,
I feel the same missing
thirst and the same cold fever,
an ear being born, an
indirect anguish,
as if thieves were arriving, or ghosts,
and inside a long, deep,
hollow shell,
like a humiliated waiter, like
a bell gone a bit hoarse,
like an old mirror, like the
smell of an empty house
where the guests come
back at night hopelessly drunk,
and there's an odor of
clothes thrown on the floor,
and an absence of flowers
--or maybe somehow a
little less melancholic--
but the truth is, suddenly,
the wind lashing my chest,
the infinitely dense nights
dropped into my bedroom,
the noise of a day burning with sacrifice
demand what there is in me
of the prophetic, with melancholy
and there's a banging of
objects that call without being answered,
and a restless motion, and
a muddled name.”
6. “Full woman, fleshy apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?”
7. ”I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.”
8. “I do not love you as if you were the salt-rose, or topaz, / or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. / I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
9. in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
10. “I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.”
11. “Inside the light
your soul makes
its circle,
refining itself to
extinction,
or enlarging its ring
like the stroke of the bell.”
12. “It's the words that sing, they soar and descend... I bow to them... I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down... I love words so much... The unexpected ones... The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop...”
13. “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you. So close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”
14. “In my sky at twilight you are a cloud / and your form and colour are the way I love them. / You are mine, mine, woman with sweet lips / and in your life my infinite dreams live.”
15. “My love, / we have found each other / thirsty and we have / drunk up all the water and the blood, / we found each other / hungry / and we bit each other / as fire bites, / leaving wounds in us.”
16. ”Naked, you are simple as one of your hands,
smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round:
you have moon-lines, apple-pathways:
naked, you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.
Naked, you are blue as a night in Cuba;
you have vines and stars in your hair;
naked you are spacious and yellow
as summer in a golden church.
Naked, you are tiny as one of your nails -
curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
and you withdraw to the underground world,
as if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores:
your clear light dims, gets dressed - drops its leaves -
and becomes a naked hand again.”
17. “Of all the stars I admired, drenched
in various rivers and mists,
I chose only the one I love.
Since then I sleep with the night.”
18. “Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.”
19. “The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”
20. "The child's foot doesn't know yet that it's a foot, and wants to be a butterfly or an apple."
21. “Will our life not be a tunnel between tow vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?”
22. “You know how this is: / if I look / at the crystal moon, at the red branch / of the slow autumn at my window, / if I touch / near the fire / the impalpable ash / or the wrinkled body of the log, / everything carries me to you, / as if everything that exists: / aromas, light, metals, / were little boats that sail / toward those isles of yours that wait for me.”
