Falena / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Falena

Slender and seraphic, dressed in black, she would hide from the sun. The shade had polished her marble complexion.
     I was suffering the captivity of my will and thinking of invisible chains, imagined by an aeda, labor of the numen of fire.
     Together the two of us, from the flowered balcony, were marveling at the tremulous jungle and a winged hunter, messenger of death, was detaching the silver leaves from trees and visiting the fountain of the deer.
     I was staying up until dawn, in the presence of my lady, saying goodbye to the sleep in my eyes and beneath the dew of the crystalline sky. The larks of jubilation were fleeing to lose themselves in the immensity, frightened by a monotonous elegy.
     The maidens of her friendship and service became disconsolate on the week of the announcement and repeated in a fateful manner the sculptural attitude of the virgins of Ismene and their voices together in a single lament.
     The beginning of her absence, the funest vision, occupies my thought at every hour. She had retired to rest, lamenting the oppression of some steel fingers upon her languid forehead and from her dressing room she summoned me with moaning goodbyes. An indecipherable being, with fissured eyes and livid face, was presiding a nocturnal masquerade.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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