Tácita, la musa décima / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Tacita, the Tenth Muse

The beautiful woman was speaking of the uncertainty of her future. She had reached the withering age and was feeling the threat of time and solitude. Men hadn’t noticed her merits and they feared her alert intelligence.
     The woman’s discourse was wounding and exhausting my sensibility. Her luck was inspiring me with desperate ideas about life. That being was suffering from her own perfection.
     I have cruelly separated her from my presence. She could interrupt my clandestine escape, through the orgy of the world, toward the lethargic embrace of death. I was glimpsing a more sedating distance whenever I would imagine the annulment of my relics in the heart of the planet blinded by snow, from the moment the sun’s millennial energy was extinguished, according to predictions by a seer of astronomy.
     My insipid days anticipate the indifferent dream of eternity.
     The author of my disquiet affectionately approaches the coffin where I lie before dying. Her onyx lamp, deposited on the floor, throws a soft glow and her abnegation is drawn in the act of sealing with her index finger the hermetic lips, decreeing silence.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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