Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

^{To Thyrsis}

In youth, gay scenes attract our eyes,

   And not suspecting their decay

Life's flowery fields before us rise,

   Regardless of its winter day.

But vain pursuits and joys as vain,

   Convince us life is but a dream.

Death is to wake, to rise again

   To that true life you best esteem.

So nightly on some shallow tide,

   Oft have I seen a splendid show;

Reflected stars on either side,

   And glittering moons were seen below.

But when the tide had ebbed away,

   The scene fantastic with it fled,

A bank of mud around me lay,

   And sea-weed on the river's bed.

Pallidly sleeping, the Ocean’s mysterious daughter
Lies in the lee of the boulder that shattered her
 charms.

Dawn rushes over the level horizon of water
And touches to flickering crimson her face and her
 arms,

While every scale in that marvelous tail
Quivers with colour like sun on a Mediterranean
 sail.

Could you not keep to the ocean that lulls the
 equator,
Soulless, immortal, and fatally fair to the gaze?
Or were you called to the North by an ecstasy greater
Than any you knew in those ancient and terrible
 days

When all your delight was to flash on the sight
Of the wondering sailor and lure him to death in the
 watery night?

Was there, perhaps, on the deck of some far away
 vessel
A lad from New England whose fancy you failed to
 ensnare?

Who, born of this virtuous rock, and accustomed to
 wrestle
With beauty in all of its forms, became your despair,
And awoke in your breast a mortal unrest
That dragged you away from the south to your
 death in the cold northwest?

Pallidly sleeping, your body is shorn of its magic,
But Death gives a soul to whatever is lovely and dies.
Now Ocean reclaims you again, lest a marvel so
 tragic
Remain to be mocked by our earthly and virtuous
 eyes,
And reason redeems already what seems
Only a fable like all of our strange and beautiful
 dreams.

          Always we are following a light,
           Always the light recedes; with groping hands
           We stretch toward this glory, while the lands
          We journey through are hidden from our sight
          Dim and mysterious, folded deep in night,
           We care not, all our utmost need demands
           Is but the light, the light! So still it stands
          Surely our own if we exert our might.
          Fool! Never can'st thou grasp this fleeting gleam,
           Its glowing flame would die if it were caught,
          Its value is that it doth always seem
           But just a little farther on. Distraught,
           But lighted ever onward, we are brought
          Upon our way unknowing, in a dream.

as in purpose; the purple of the hillside
enrolled me in its misery, mysterious mist
emanating.

             When it was over the day
descended in the form of a star, ours,
which is to say the dark returned

which is to say a measure of darkness inter
posed between and among the sources
the lights twinkling against a moon.

This was a landscape longed for, lost.
Long as a verb—to increase in length
of days, of nights, of neither.

Still the purple stain, floral embellishment,
ingrains itself, inhabits banished gardens.

Out of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping,
Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping
To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping.

Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel
Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel
Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel.

And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops
Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue crops
Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops.

And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes,
The rainbow arching over in the skies,
New sparks of wonder opening in surprise.

All these pure things come foam and spray of the sea
Of Darkness abundant, which shaken mysteriously,
Breaks into dazzle of living, as dolphins that leap from the sea
Of midnight shake it to fire, so the secret of death we see.

^{translated from the Spanish by Mary Crow}

My most beautiful hiding places,
places that best fit my soul’s deepest colors,
are made of all that others forgot.

They are solitary sites hollowed out in the grass’s caress,
in a shadow of wings, in a passing song;
regions whose limits swirl with the ghostly carriages
that transport the mist in the dawn,
and in whose skies names are sketched, ancient words of love,
vows burning like constellations of drunken fireflies.

Sometimes earthly villages pass, hoarse trains make camp,
a couple piles marvelous oranges at the edge of the sea,
a single relic is spread through all space.
My places would look like broken mirages,
clippings of photographs torn from an album to orient nostalgia,
but they have roots deeper than this sinking ground,
these fleeing doors, these vanishing walls.

They are enchanted islands where only I can be the magician.

And who else, if not I, is climbing the stairs towards those attics in the clouds
where the light, aflame, used to hum in the siesta’s honey,
who else will open again the big chest where the remains of an unhappy story lie,
sacrificed a thousand times only to fantasy, only to foam,
and try on the rags again
like those costumes of invincible heroes,
circle of fire that inflamed time’s scorpion?

Who cleans the windowpane with her breath and stirs the fire of the afternoon
in those rooms where the table was an altar of idolatry,
each chair, a landscape folded up after every trip,
and the bed, a stormy short cut to the other shore of dreams,
rooms deep as nets hung from the sky,
like endless embraces I slid down till I brushed the feathers of death,
until I overturned the laws of knowledge and the fall of man?

Who goes into the parks with the golden breath of each Christmas
and washes the foliage with a little gray rag that was the handkerchief for waving goodbye,
and reweaves the garlands with a thread of tears,
repeating a fantastic ritual among smashed wine glasses and guests lost in thought,
while she savors the twelve green grapes of redemption—
one for each month, one for each year, one for each century of empty indulgence—
a taste acid but not as sharp as the bread of forgetfulness?

Because who but I changes the water for all the memories?
Who inserts the present like a slash into the dreams of the past?
Who switches my ancient lamps for new ones?

My most beautiful hiding places are solitary sites where no one goes,
and where there are shadows that only come to life when I am the magician.

Mis refugios más bellos,
los lugares que se adaptan mejor a los colores últimos de mi alma,
están hechos de todo lo que los otros olvidaron.

Son sitios solitarios excavados en la caricia de la hierba,
en una sombra de alas; en una canción que pasa;
regiones cuyos límites giran con los carruajes fantasmales
que transportan la niebla en el amanecer
y en cuyos cielos se dibujan nombres, viejas frases de amor,
juramentos ardientes como constelaciones de luciérnagas ebrias.

Algunas veces pasan poblaciones terrosas, acampan roncos trenes,
una pareja junta naranjas prodigiosas en el borde del mar,
una sola reliquia se propaga por toda la extensión.
Parecerían espejismos rotos,
recortes de fotografías arrancados de un álbum para orientar a la nostalgia,
pero tienen raíces más profundas que este suelo que se hunde,
estas puertas que huyen, estas paredes que se borran.

Son islas encantadas en las que sólo yo puedo ser la hechicera.

¿Y quién si no, sube las escaleras hacia aquellos desvanes entre nubes
donde la luz zumbaba enardecida en la miel de la siesta,
vuelve a abrir el arcón donde yacen los restos de una historia inclemente,
mil veces inmolada nada más que a delirios, nada más que a espumas,
y se prueba de nuevo los pedazos
como aquellos disfraces de las protagonistas invencibles,
el círculo de fuego con el que encandilaba al escorpión del tiempo?

¿Quién limpia con su aliento los cristales y remueve la lumbre del atardecer
en aquellas habitaciones donde la mesa era un altar de idolatría,
cada silla, un paisaje replegado después de cada viaje,
y el lecho, un tormentoso atajo hacia la otra orilla de los sueños;
aposentos profundos como redes suspendidas del cielo,
como los abrazos sin fin donde me deslizaba hasta rozar las plumas de la muerte,
hasta invertir las leyes del conocimiento y la caída?

¿Quién se interna en los parques con el soplo dorado de cada Navidad
y lava los follajes con un trapito gris que fue el pañuelo de las despedidas,
y entrelaza de nuevo los guirnaldas con un hilo de lágrimas,
repitiendo un fantástico ritual entre copas trizadas y absortos comensales,
mientras paleada en las doce uvas verdes de la redención—
una por cada mes, una por cada año, una por cada siglo de vacía indulgencia—
un ácido sabor menos mordiente que el del pan del olvido?

¿Por qué quién sino yo les cambia el agua a todos los recuerdos?
¿Quién incrusta el presente como un tajo ante las proyecciones del pasado?
¿Alguien trueca mis lámparas antiguas por sus lámparas nuevas?

Mis refugios más bellos son sitios solitarios a los que nadie va
y en los que sólo hay sombras que se animan cuando soy la hechicera.

So you’ve come back

to me, again, at last,

to leave—walked me this far

through crowds to say that, here,

you must turn a corner,

distance yourself,

throw this fiction of us on the pyre;

with a smirk on your face,

watch it burn—eyes in awe

as a patron of torture;

you, who would be most constant

when the caucuses of early hour

begin to bicker in the brain:

what word to hold you in place

beneath this captive’s power

or persuade a part of you

to concede itself to savior,

to haul this burden into some other life?

Today a rainstorm caught me
and I still have not recovered
myself with drier blankets
The brown leaves blowing
off the trees, squirrels
and robins cheering them on, but not

cheering me     And anxiousness has an owl
by the throat, has me pill-popped up
to Heaven Hill, head spinning one hundred eighty
degrees, looking to the past and the future
for some news about the present

which of course is useless     Even I know that     Mean-
while, Agnes upstairs plays with Grace—
the little neighbor girl—not the idea of unmerited
forgiveness in light      The two of them make up
words to no music or to My Fictions
and The Saddest Landscape

Sometimes it’s hard to say which,
no matter how hard I pretend to listen
I am no expert at thunder and lightning
I am no expert at eggbirds and ghost-
typing the air to remember a song

Today a rainstorm caught me up
The rain came down, and it still comes down
The rain comes down is all I know

about how sometimes life finds me stupid on the porch
with a couple of empty beer bottles,
humming and waiting for god knows what, some
warm weather to calm me, a few minor thoughts
All these days, reasons end somewhere

The water still rolls with an owl in its blood
We reverberate through it very softly

Bring me all of your dreams, 
You dreamers. 
Bring me all of your 
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them 
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too rough fingers
Of the world.