I REMEMBER

I remember,
flowering on my branch,
my trunk swaying in the winter
with its silver foliage
in the wind,
soft and blue, like a ghost.
And I remember
- nostalgia is love, isn't it? -
that icy lethargy
lying on the pale bedroom
where once, I remember,
the impassioned flame
climbed up my body
like a bonfire from underground.
  
Buds of that fire
a scarlet flowering
for my livid specter's foliage
and my pearly trunk.
The blaze enveloped me
hugging my flesh and my soul
and I flowered with love, in the silence,
a pure acacia, burning.

Scaring away dreams
as if scaring huge blue butterflies,
scaring away the night that sends ghosts out
to walk on desolate peaks,
leaving behind pillows in sleepwalking beds,
pillows that lifted me into the air, like clouds,
I move toward my body,
as if to a clearing in the woods, or a sweet mirror:
I move toward the vegetable moon, my hair,
I move toward the soles of skin that carry me.
And when I reach it and touch the branches and descend
to feel the shadowy roots that nourish me,
I'm whipped by a yearning wild as the wind,
it shudders in my soles and shakes my hair.
I hear nocturnal voices and blind men's violins,
from crumpled parchments a perfume rises
and an angel on my shoulder is ready to fly.
Where to?  Who knows!  He lifts off and soars.
Someone, on earth, speaks vaguely of the sky
and I'm surrounded by huge blue butterflies.

From JEWISH CEMETERY (PRAGUE)

Suddenly a forest in one's hands.
The stags are left, the rabbits are left,
only familiar animals run away.
The tigers are left, their abstract fields
on a huge striped area in the grass,
and the blue birds are escaping
cage and all toward the white sky,
An early sin is left without amendments,
a change in the transparent customs.

The newest cradle is revealed in tablets
rocked by a mother's song, an earthly song.
Primordial, subterranean motherhood
forging the fruit from boiling of the bone;
deceiving mother, captive guardian,
who covers up the garden with a desert
of individual life she later saves
from man, from sepulchers and from the specter.
Mother profound who changes all the names
and turns a fountain jet into a hair
and says it's raining when she sees a tear
and calls a rose what once had been a brain.
When I say "dearth",
she pronounces a "heap".
A man who kisses failing visages
is kissing what is personal and dead,
but she evades both visages and masks
and prepares to give the illimitable kiss,
the one that binds coagulum and sap
in primeval and warm affinity.
Remember, word,
what you are, how you are, trim and round,
not water but in water and behind water
and with water with no more foot nor mat.