the rain - la lluvia

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent --
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me

lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Toda la noche el sonido

ha vuelto nuevamente
y nuevamente cae
esta tranquila, persistente lluvia.

Qué soy para mi mismo,
que deba ser recordado
repetido
tan a menudo? Es

que nunca la paz,
aún la frialdad,
de la lluvia cayendo
tendrá para mí

algo más que esto,
algo tan insistente---
encerrado estaré en este
final desasosiego.

Amor, si me amas,
tiéndete junto a mí.
Sé para mí, como la lluvia,
la huida
del cansancio, la simplicidad, el mediano
ardor de intencional indiferencia.

Permanece en la humedad
con una felicidad honesta.

(traducido del inglés por la autora de este blog.)

the definition of love

My love is of a birth as rare 

As ’tis for object strange and high; 

It was begotten by Despair 

Upon Impossibility. 

Magnanimous Despair alone 

Could show me so divine a thing 

Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown, 

But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing. 

And yet I quickly might arrive 

Where my extended soul is fixt, 

But Fate does iron wedges drive, 

And always crowds itself betwixt. 

For Fate with jealous eye does see 

Two perfect loves, nor lets them close; 

Their union would her ruin be, 

And her tyrannic pow’r depose. 

And therefore her decrees of steel 

Us as the distant poles have plac’d, 

(Though love’s whole world on us doth wheel) 

Not by themselves to be embrac’d; 

Unless the giddy heaven fall, 

And earth some new convulsion tear; 

And, us to join, the world should all 

Be cramp’d into a planisphere. 

As lines, so loves oblique may well 

Themselves in every angle greet; 

But ours so truly parallel, 

Though infinite, can never meet. 

Therefore the love which us doth bind, 

But Fate so enviously debars, 

Is the conjunction of the mind, 

And opposition of the stars.

street wise romantic

The streets are empty and still,
between the red time,
then start again.
Trucks bouncing by,
cars to work, work.
The farms are disappearing as I noticed
years ago along this old route.
Now the farms lie beneath
hotels, office complexes whose beauty
is beyond the senses
in some economic realm fortified
by the delusions of power and inequity.
But the farms are lying beneath
and large poisonous plants
fusing the electrical circuits beneath.
No there’s no death to evil,
it rises again, now in war, now in bucks
now in land, now in power,
it rises up forever until the end,
when the light may intercede and remain.
Seek refuge from the fantasy
into one other fantasy.
We see violence done on subways on streets
but we don’t see violence done
in a new class system or economic twist.
Does it murder just as well?
Nothing can be done.
It will go on and on
until the intercessions of the sun.
Everything else has failed, and will,
but the innocence of youth
and the momentum of dawn.