Through the air you hear the scream, the echo, the distance.

Someone crosses the street corners with the wind, and his look
For an instant is like a dagger scraping the shadows.
Waking one hears their steps moving secretly away
Along the deserted street following a shout.

A woman or ship or cloud at night slides like a river.
Close to the quiet water of the footsteps
No one observes the face, its icy profile
In front of the white silence of the wall.

(On the sea beneath the moon sailing would not be
So slow and pale,
As on the sidewalks, undulating,
Its clear form in waves
Advances and retreats.

Those footsteps, brushing the air, hold back from the earth:
It is not the repeated body that in half-hour hotels
Amongst unexpected lovers and porters
Her naked body is dazzled by hands upon hands
And awakens sleepy
In a hushed movement
While jumbled laments
Form in the memory.

In the darkness they are flashes of lightning,
The inflamed moisture of those eyes
Of a hidden, surprised wild beast,
And something instantaneous shines,
The rebelliousness of the sudden angel
And his disappearance into the shadows.)

The night, the square, the desolation
Of the slender column against time.
Then, a sharp and subterranean noise
Tears the silence
Of rails on which heavy coaches of dreams
Travel toward the stations of Hell.

The clock sleeps lightly, the bell's stroke rents the clear air.
In the desert of offices, in courtyards,
In pavilions of hoarse, somber light,
The silence grows with the moon
And, not for gardens, it settles in car horns,
In repair shops, in bars,
In the weary drawing rooms of lonely women,
Until, like exhaustion,
The shadow vanishes into thicker shadow.

From the fever in circles of ceilings,
Oh, sad vagabond among stone clouds,
The somnambulist drags his delirium along the sidewalks.
The wind blows after devastations and empty spaces,
It slips hidden like a razor caressed by fingers,
It steps back before the erect dream of the towers,
It chaotically floods streets like a vanquished sea.

Its wings go on in avenues, its lugubrious flight in suburbs:
The eternity deepens in one, sole instant
And in the air the scream, the echo, the distance, resound.

Death and life advance
Among that obscure invasion of phantoms.
The fallen bodies are uniformly silent.
A body dies, but another sweet and warm body barely sleeps
And the ardent respiration of its skin
Shakes the solitary man in his bed,
Reaching him as aromas from afar, from a wood
Of young and nocturnal vegetation.