STONE THAT GERMINATES

 

After you looked at me,

You left inside me such grace and beauty.

                San Juan de la Cruz

 

 

Like quickened lightning

Love alights.

With its claws it opens

Furrows in the land.

 

And the moss grows,

The pale lime, the tree

revered by the tribe.

 

And tenderness grows

astride the dawn.

 

And the day’s full heart surges

Like a thick whispering

from the rock.

And the ocean begins

An impestuous sacred dance.

‘Tis here the splendor is reborn.

 

If you fixed your eyes in my eyes

If you fixed your lips on my lips

If your mouth were a stinging bee

Or a hungry needle delving into the blood.

Were you to settle down, thirsty, between my legs,

I would love you throughly, blindly, tenderly,

Like someone who peeks at the world for the first time

Like someone who for the first time

Tears a violet apart.

 

All things run ablaze if I look at you.

All the stones germinate if I look at you.

 

Like a dizzying bird song you arrive

and I drink from your presence as from a stream

with trees bending over it.

Like some seductive slow-motion dance,

Like fertile dew upon the sand,

Like the chastity of the saint singed

by the soft perfection of the figure

immaculate you come.

What difficult work is yours, Beloved: to be beautiful.

The crow’s crowing stirrs me,

Pegasus’ flight enthralls me,

The trilling of your voice is all I need.

 

Without you, tender bee, the Universe lacks all meaning.

Like a fierce patriarch I carry on,

Like some wise prophet I prophane you.

 

Beloved Queen of the Valley of Jovel,

The one with the Sweetest and most Terrible Countenance,

I know you come from the land where apple trees grow

And that in your eyes beehives cluster.

Oh so much honey overflowing the iris.

And such perfection in your figure.

 

May the gold in my kiss sustain you.

May the rock in my song consecrate you.

 

YOU WILL NOT BE OVERCOME by death.

The damned stench of the tomb will never be your lot

even were the laws that rule the flower,

the unbending wheel of summer, slide

and damage and stall your beauty.

 

Gazelle, stork or doe

like a tender mother I shelter you,

yet tremble should a stark blow

from reality strike at you.

 

I conjure the presence of what is eternal.

Brilliant teardrop from the sun:

I have awakened the serpent.

I have seen the trembling of the Unicorn.

I have set the raging Dragon free.

 

Fragile, disturbed,

in order to sing I follow the slow rhythms of silence.

To love I submerge myself into the void.

Who says that terror will consume you?

From the highest sphere I deliver

My voice unto the ocean.

 

And I throb

and my hair stands on end

and I consecrate myself

blind.

 

I make the murky afternoon murkier.

 

The heart houses roses, sour stumps,

Bitter jaws that devour

It is equally as well a raucous fist.

 

But I give myself to you like some thirsty conk-shell.

Delirium, purified flame that throbs,

what do the blind do when faced with the Light?

 

I bend over, weak blade of grass, if you look at me.

My heart is shipwrecked by a sudden wave.

A resounding blaze at noon you are,

tenderness sand made moist.

 

 

Óscar Wong

 

México-Tenochtitlan, Jan. 5, 1998.

 

 

(From Razones de la voz, CNCA, Colec. Práctica Mortal, Méx., 2002, 73 pp.)

 

Traducción de Sylvia María Valls