Heads of hair and confused dreams
cover the bodies like muffled mosses
in the night, in the embroidering shade
of deep velvets and oblivion.

Gold flickers the sky like beaks
of birds that swoop down in flocks,
black warps inlaid with living gold,
over that great silence of corpses.

And thus, alone, saved from the shade,
next to the library where the murmur
of aged trunks wanders, I hear something like
the limitless clamour of a valley.

Harsh drum amid the night, it sounds
when all are dead, when all
in the dream, in death, fall into
a silence full and deep as a scream.

Let the dream of silky wings haunt me,
haunt me like a laurel of dark leaves
but oh the great hurricane of the deep silences,
of the clamorous silences.

And next to that bivouac of old books,
while the still night that imitates
a grove moves shade and silence,
I look for you in the prodigious depths,
fiery, voracious, chained word.

Translation: 2004, Raúl Jaime Gaviria