Where one can be seen. What places one frequents

You occur in everything that remains unnamed.
You happen in the sand escaping the hand of time.

Your sex occurs while nobody watches,
flowers and graduates
in a sad room
and nobody is going to see it.

You have a place in your mother’s eyes,
in the mouth of friends, tailors and shopkeepers,
in the silence of accountants,
in all the words, meals, and disasters
that your memory discarded.

But you occur like never before on the sidewalks
when free of vigils your single oceanic
form bursts forth.

Your single oceanic form,
the manners of mercury.

You are an exile, an insistence in a thousand directions,
the strength of the wind and its erratic coupling.
It seems like your branches were budding alliances,
that all were signs of an intimate
uprising.            And the leaves
fall, and there is no roar,
symphony nor conclusion. 

Although exactly beautiful, a moment.

You will never know what face you wear when nobody looks at you.
It is a fish from the abyss, a story made flesh,
what the gods say when the sun is rising,
what an Atlantan thinks when seeing he is threatened.
Gift of the vagrant, great dignity and a bed for sweetness.

But you will never know about yourself in treasure.

The days ride on the days,
everything that breaks carries a remembrance of itself,
the science of the collar governs mortals.

But never you, never unanimous, never sky of you.

Translated by Curtis Bauer
“Where one can be seen. What places one frequents” is from Altar de los días parados [Altar of Stationary Days] (Madrid, Bartleby Editores, S.L., 2003).

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