Landscape with Yellow Birds (José Angel Valente)




FROM YOUR DROWNED HEART death’s dark exhalation reaches me, as your voice did formerly. Live in me with death. So not even it can ever tear you away from me.


THE EXACT HOUR. You missed our appointment. Absent. The final shape of your blind hope: evening’s broken flight and the explosion at the end of so much shadow.


ON THE SAND I trace with my fingers an interminable double line as a symbol of the infinite duration of this dream.


SLOWLY. From the other side. I could barely, by now, hear your voice.


INTO MY EYES the light suddenly floods. As though you, suddenly, had come back to life.


THE BODY of a stranger. Lifting your body in the anonymous dusk. There was no longer any sign in you to make you ours.


NEITHER WORD nor silence. Nothing helped me to make you live.


IT SEEMED TO ME NOW as though love had been suspended. And that wasn’t it. Merely that you would never return.


A SUBMERGED LANDSCAPE. I entered you. In you I entered slowly. I entered barefoot and didn’t find you. You, nevertheless, were there. You didn’t see me. We hadn’t any longer a way to signal our mutual presence. Crossing paths, then, without seeing each other. Yellow birds. Absolute transparency of nearness.


THE FINAL EVENING. The pale light ebbs. I flow from the open wound in my side to the stiffened river of your veins.


CONVERGENCE. Leaf falls on leaf. Rain over the entire extension of bereavement.


I THOUGHT I KNEW a name of yours that would make you come back. I don’t know it or I can’t find it. It is I who is dead and has forgotten, I tell myself, your secret.


A MAN carries the ashes of a body in a small bundle under his arm. It’s raining. There is nobody here. He walks as though he could deliver his package to some destination. He sees himself walking. He sees himself on an endless moor. At the end, a devouring entrance awaits him--a blind labyrinth.


WHAT are these clouds, tell me, that the wind drags to the burning end of the evening like locks of hair? Did you make this path? Did you do it without me? When?


AS EVENING FALLS, the invisible hand of a god erases you like the wing of a bird falling toward how dense a shadow beyond all shadow. You have melted, in the end, into your own gaze.


BY NOW YOU WERE WOUNDING YOURSELF laboriously so as not to take a hand no longer stretched out to you. A hard, anonymous residue, your body, in this unpredictable evening. There was nobody by your side. Therefore, you could not die.


IN THE MIRROR your image was erased. It didn’t see you when it looked at itself.


NOW I KNOW that the two of us had a common, or shared childhood, since together we have died. And I am moved by the desire to go to the place where you lie to deposit, next to yours, like late-blooming flowers, my own ashes.


THERE IS a quiet, metallic peace in the air below a grey expanse multiplied by the motionless lake. Ash-colored silver the water, the flight, the air, your air, that of this absence.


YOU KNEW that only at the end did I know your name. Not the one that belonged to you, but the other name, the most secret one, the one to which you still belonged.


THE ART WE PRACTICE is minimal, poor, unmarketable, save on limited occasions, never public, like this one, here, this afternoon, at the indefinable hour of absolute disappearance.


WHAT WAS loneliness, I ask, your face at the end facing nothing, the time that quickly ceased to be time ensconced in itself, the wounding line of dark light that invaded your eyes, and you started to walk on it, without net or witness, when the shadows slipped from your blood to your entrails, and there you were unborn.


YOUR SIGN was the moon. Your light, lunar. Melancholy. How slow the trace of your disappearance. Never were you nearer to me.


I AM WEAK. I don’t know where to prop myself up. The air is empty of any being. You aren’t here. I’m not here. What a spinning body that of nothingness.


I TOUCH THE SHADOWS at the fall of evening, in morning’s solar plenitude, awake or in dreams alike, and perhaps I stick my arms out in front, groping a blind profile that I don’t succeed in naming, I believe that I have seen beings I still love and that I will never see again or that wouldn’t recognize me, since who could recognize whom, when you are no longer here and that final summer dragged your images far away, very far, and with them the only indisputable reference to the visible.


I WANT to have been in the places where you have been, in all the places where perhaps there still remains or survives a fragment of you or of your gaze. Could this corrosive emptiness of yours be what suddenly makes a place out of space? A place, your absence?


I COULD NOT DECIPHER, at the end of the days and times, who the god was whom I had once invoked.


SLOWLY MOONS followed moons, as light gives way to light, days to days, the obstinate eyelid to the identical dream. It’s easy to live, hard to survive what has been lived.


THE SNOW’S SINISTER BLANKNESS. The air’s low, grey ceiling. The clouds, like dejected beasts, level with the rooftops. A livid wing or space like a metallic plaque over our heads. City of bloodless usuries. Others will look on you with a gladder heart. Never the bird that could never find in you rest or dwelling-place.


AT TIMES I feel very near to death. I wonder who could find this observation useful. In the end we don’t write about the useful, I think. Why not utter, then, an obvious banality? The nearness of death is the intersection of two flat, bare surfaces that repelling each other fuse together. Nothing more? I don’t know. To pass to the other side is not enough unless I have the witness’s confident testimony, which I have not yet figured out how to transcribe.


HOW LITTLE GOOD IT DID for us to live. How short the time we had to discover that the two of us were the same man. While the subtle bird of air incubates your ashes I am, barely at the limit, a tenuous edge of nonexistent shadow.


NOW THAT sitting alone before the same window I see one more time the sky falling like a slow curtain at the end of the act, I say again to myself: Is this the end of our simple love, Agone?