Semejante a su semejanza / Guillermo Sucre

Similar to His Semblance

                                                                  Homage to J.L.L.

Everyone writes or wants to write from life.
He had to write with figures torn from death.
His joy knew the desert.
He loved the letter and corresponded to it.
In the course of light and shadow he fixed the fugitive apparition of absence.
The quotidian would become absolute for him: the innumerable festival of
   the numerable.

The vicinities, the warm conversation of winter in the parks, the feminine
   penumbra of the house, the laborious sacrament of coffee, the humidified
   spirals of the cigar,
and the asthma of the nights the disciplined rapture of the hand, the descents,
   the resurrections, the world flowing in the mass of his finest animals,
and within memory the crevice where the gods shine, the child who has broken
   the jar of wisdom, the letters of an already old man sealed by fidelity, by
   penury, erasing themselves in modesty,
and always the wait, always the vast, the helpless waiting.

To live was to breathe amid nocturnal stalactites the evaporation of the
   promised Island.
The waters were convened to dissolve the last manuscript of Havana.
Whoever dissolves everything will attain limpidity.
Whoever has said everything will draw in silence.
From the empty nets leaps the stellar fish.
From a man so close to distance we will always see the radiant face,
   the humility of the now unnamable splendor.




{Guillermo Sucre, published in the anthology Las ínsulas extrañas: Antología de poesía en lengua española (1950-2000), Barcelona: Galaxia de Gutenberg/Circulo de Lectores, 2002 }