Leave Poetry

For subtracting when you add.
For filling your table with birds.
For taking you to a place you don’t know how to leave.
For punishing you without speaking.
For telling you: you are alone.
For preferring that you carry the burden
of its centuries-long pain
when you feel new.
For its preposterous magnet.
For the thirst it produces
when it pretends to be water.
For its parallel life.
For speaking to you
when you want to sleep.
For its pride of a misguided beast.
Because it looks at death
out of the corner of its eye
when it sings oh beauty.
For not giving explanations.
For being self-sufficient.
For being insufficient.
For drinking the shadow of tomorrow.

Translated by Curtis Bauer
“Leave Poetry” is from Cleaning Fish: Collected Poems (Visor, 2005); this English translation appeared in The Dirty Goat #25.

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