Poets were always, effectively, men
of transition, Roberto
Fernández Retamar; because really, my friend, if a poet
doesn't see the transitions leaping
at his sides like eruptions of smoking lava, better
that he ceases to be one,
cedes that perfumed guise to other senses
more perceptive. Baudelaire was a poet
of transition, as was Talero; and Abz-ul-Agrib and Rosario,
who closed the doors to the houses
of tolerance; brothels with cheeses and wines and devil-hams and
the jarana agitating skirts and other flags. The cries and crimes
in atrocious places and untimely moments were poets
of transition; my God, how much
poetry of transition was engraved in the knife used to cut
virginities; how much baptistery has licked
the salt of transition, has fluttered
at the sound of altar boys: Jacopo della Quercia was a man
of transition, even the countess
de Noailles must have written
poetry of transition. And I'm forgetting people,
leaks covered by transitory
patches, by the transiting of the unprepared masses
that go slowly in search of water and transitive
skies. Those yawns, those masses,
are poems of transition, my dear Roberto; those furies,
essentially, these violent methods of walking towards the void-this
time was always plagued-and if there are no
transitions, it will be necessary to signal the end of these hostile
and restless worlds, sound
the trumpets and leave running from the playing field beneath
the thrown rocks-surely-and blown raspberries: it will be, despite
all the years of waiting and warning, a fairly unpopular fact;
a piece of bad news, a little alarmist, like the Apocalypse itself.

On the surface that leaps
over the snow, on the Andean
crease. Starry against the firmness
of the low sky, diluted
like a nameless god, an indirect
air, an empty breeze: emblems
to be heard and explained; responding
to questions and joys.

Find the corners in which it dwelled,
resigned to death all this time
without anyone blowing the ash off the water,
the arcs of the rivers that don't respond,
don't articulate the acts of the end of times.

In the harms done and the deaths, in cast-off witnesses
of injustice, blood spread, point-blank
treason-I'm thinking of José, for example, of his
luminous goodness, of the right he had to hope-, I come
to fall across the backs
of these last
words united so they can be resolved.

One single gust of time past,
pronounced syllable by syllable, act by act. In
the commotion, beneath the first clods,
I come to offer the uselessness
of my defeat, to open revenge
over death (that pre-speech, the scream),
a victory wide like the past that will come forth,
like my life which doesn't belong to me
as long as it's foreign-others have appropriated it, to
others I owe it-and common to the bulk of destiny.

That memory, arranger of people, that
signer of the future that waits with arms
open; this life that leaps over my shoulders
to continue its game and its rank. It leaves
behind fatality, also buried like the viceroys,
like disinterred egoism-conjured
in loneliness. Because life-I have seen it-depends
on a thread instructive and generous, closes
the short circuits, makes ovals from imperfect eggs.

In the children of the sun that rises, the marvel
that hides all claws, I caress
the animals preferred by the intact universe, the
splendor of the skin of the metal
that releases the roar of the imagination, the fuel
devoured by good fortune.

And the history of happiness will not
be exclusive, but will belong to all of the quarreling
earth and its air, its back and its profile, its cough and its laugh. I am no longer
from here; I hardly feel I am a memory
in passing. My confidence balances on a profound disdain
for this disgraceful world. I will give
my life so that nothing continues as it is.