Excess of Life

I have been thinking about death since I met you.

But what I have in mind is nothing like

common sorrow. It’s more like a certainty

of the totality of my days in this 

world where I’ve been able to find you.

Suddenly I have all the impatience of everyone

who loved and loves, the unshareable urgency

of those in love. I don’t want geography

but love—it is the only thing my heart knows.

In my life there is no room for this excess of life.

It would be better to tell you I meditate on things

(borders and distances) in the proper terms

of resurrection, when we will rise

over the fixed locations of time and space,

independent of the sea that separates us.

The perfect moment I dream of is the embrace,

unrushed, the kisses that have remained unkissed.

I dream that your body lives next to my body

and I wait for the morning when there will be no limits.

 Translated by Curtis Bauer
“Excess of Life” was published in Eros Is More (Alice James Books, 2014).

You can read and listen the poem in the original Spanish here.