Let no one in the indecipherable night fear
that I shall lose my way among the borders
of black flowers that weave a cloth of symbols
appropriate to old nostalgic loves.

or the sloth of afternoons-the hidden bird
forever whittling the same thin song,
the circular fountain and the summerhouse,
the indistinct statue and the hazy ruins

Hollow in the hollow shade, the coachhouse
marks (I know) the insubstantial edges
of this world of dust and jasmine,
pleasing to Verlaine, pleasing to Julio Herrera.

The eucalyptus trees bestow on the gloom
their medicinal smell: that ancient balm
that, beyond all time and ambiguity
of language, speaks of vanished country houses.

My footsteps seek and find the anticipated
threshold. Its darkened limit is defined
by the roof, and in the chessboard patio
the water-tap drips intermittently

On the other side of the door they sleep,
those who through the medium of dreams
watch over in the visionary shadows
all that vast yesterday and all dead things.
I know every single object of this old
building: the flakes of mica
on that gray stone reflected endlessly
in the recesses of a faded mirror,

And the lion’s head that bites
an iron ring and the multicolored window glass,
that reveals to a child the wonders
of one world colored red and another colored green.

Far beyond all chance and death
they endure, each one with its particular story,
but all this is happening in the strangeness
of that fourth dimension, which is memory.

In it and it alone do they exist
The patios and the gardens. And the past
preserves them in a circular preserve
embracing all at once the dawn and the dusk.

How could I lose that precise
order of humble and beloved things,
as inaccessible as the roses
revealed to Adam in Paradise?

The ancient aura of an elegy
still haunts me when I think of that house
and I do not understand how time can pass,
I, who am time and blood and agony.