A rainy afternoon, light among the slow
Clouds, the air livid,
The shelters bare, the bodies motionless
In the cold.
Thus is the city I inhabit.
And suddenly night falls with its icy shadows:
Immense desolation in a breast
That understands nothing.

There is a solitary pallidness in the translucent
Air like a morning in childhood.
Pensive, I remember then
Having kept silent before the invading solitude of the rainy season
Beneath the desperate anger
Of water and lightning.

My sky, faded horizon without brightness,
The sky of mine, the obstinacy of its white,
The frequent rain falling on the region.
A place that should stretch out in agony,
That a sad bird should cross,
That should sink under the twilight
Or that I should love
Till dying or forgetting.

Today I ask myself and say: the aerial feathers
Used to arrive in shadow with their purplish brows. But, how
Did that invasion of great clouds
Beget the loneliness of bodies?
The men I know, absent, unwitnessed,
Their faces revealing the presence of ennui,
Only love the rainy season's deep sorrow.

Close to the extended rainy season,
Once, somnambulist,
I got lost in front of a landscape
Of green ruins around houses.

The plain grew with the whistle of the wind,
Perpetual, extended light, glacial color of remoteness,
Solitary expanse like
An unknown sea in the late afternoon.

Full of somber obstinacy I wanted
To walk in a city without men, made for the rain.
The empty squares, no breathings of
Love and pain.
Greenness growing between the stones of the streets,
The sobbing palpitation under each step.
Nothing more in the desolate prevalence of white.
Over the white, abandoned walls, not even the weak
Weight of the air, nor the reflections on the windows.
Just a cruel wind from one extreme to another like a cry.

In such a city to find you, your image,
Your image recovered from an ancient, secret time,
Sole inhabitant of a city defeated by the rain.

As a child, entranced by the great rainy seasons
On the balcony where the cities
Built by the dreams appeared,
When the sun already subdued the density of the atmosphere,
In the bays of clouds, cities.
In the splendor of remote summers,
Beyond the seas and the islands,
Surging from hot countries
Or in the avenues buried in the air,
I expected to find you some day,
Alive, with a summer flash of lighting in your hair.

But only on a rainy night, crossing a street corner,
A voice like a sob, singular and endless in the heart,
Lost echo in the spectral calm of my memory,
I found you, melancholy dream,
A reflection even more beautiful than life,
Rigid in your silence, as elusive as the shadows.