I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratúe.

I love the handful of the earth you are.
Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.

Your wide eyes are the only light I know
from extinguished constellations;
your skin throbs like the streak
of a meteor through rain.

Your hips were that much of the moon for me;
your deep mouth and its delights, that much sun;
your heart, fiery with its long red rays,

was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.
So I pass across your burning form, kissing
you – compact and planetary, my dove, my globe.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Love, how often I loved you without seeing– without remembering you–
not recognizing your glance, not knowing you, a gentian
in the wrong place, scorching in the hot noon,
but I loved only the smell of the wheat.

Or maybe I saw you, imagined you lifting a wineglass
in Angol, by the light of the summer’s moon;
or were you the waist of that guitar I strummed
in the shadows, the one that rang like an impetuous sea?

I loved you without knowing I did; I searched to remember you.
I broke into houses to steal your likeness,
though I already knew what you were like. And, suddenly,

when you were there with me I touched you, and my life
stopped: you stood before me, you took dominion like a queen:
like a wildfire in the forest, and the flame is your dominion.

The fire for light, a rancorous moon for bread,
the jasmine smearing around its bruised secrets:
then from a terrifying love, soft white hands
poured peace into my eyes and sun into my senses.

O love, how quickly you built a sweet
firmness where the wounds had been!
You fought off the talons and claws, and now
we stand as a single life before the world.

That’s how it was, how it is, how it will be,
my wild sweet love, my dearest Matilde,
till time signals us with the day’s last flower:

then there will be no you, no me, no light,
and yet beyond the earth, beyond its shadowy dark,
the splendor of our love will be alive.

Before I loved you, Love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among objects:
nothing mattered or had a name:
the world was made of air, which waited.

I knew rooms full of ashes,
tunnels where the moon lived,
rough warehouses that growled Get lost,
questions that insisted in the sand.

Everything was empty, dead, mute,
fallen, abandoned, and decayed:
inconceivably alien, it all

belonged to someone else– to no one:
till your beauty and your poverty
filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

Naked, you are simple as one of your hands,
smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round:
you have moon-lines, apple-pathways:
naked, you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

Naked, you are blue as a night in Cuba;
you have vines and stars in your hair;
naked, you are spacious and yellow
as summer in a golden church.

Naked, you are tiny as one of your nails–
curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
and you withdraw to the underground world,

as if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores:
your clear light dims, gets dressed– drops its leaves–
and becomes a naked hand again.

You have the thick hair of a larch from the archipelago,
skin made by centuries of time,
veins that have known seas of forest timber,
green blood dropped from the sky into memory.

No one will retrieve my lost heart
from all those roots, from the fresh-bitter glare
of the sun multiplied on the water.
That’s where it lives, the shadow that does not follow me.

And that’s why you rose from the South like an island
crowded and crowned with feathers and timber:
I smelled the scent of those drifting forests,

I found the dark honey I’d known in the woods;
on your hips I touched those opaque petals
that were born with me, that made up my soul.