Del país lívido / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

From the Livid Country

I didn’t dare interrupt the peace of the uniform olive trees with my voice. I was venerating their foliage of a citrine color. They had grown, according to a law, in the circuit of a group of impassive willows.
     The remains of a Roman aqueduct augmented the majesty of the somber valley. A scale adorned the entrance of a temple profaned by unfaithful generations and meant the irremissible threats of justice in a higher world.
     I would purposely lose myself in the avenues, invoking the deceased of my predilection. A red sun, omen of the temporal, was disappearing in the fog of the humid afternoon.
     The affection and presence of an assiduous shadow had pulled me from the earth. I was retiring to rest when the moon, star of the dead, occupied the middle of the sky.
     An identical ghost, a relic of the myth of Psyche, was visiting me in the middle of a dream. I would awaken with the memory of having exhausted myself in an implausible chase and I discovered the soot of a nocturnal butterfly on my fingers.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }