/ Translated from Spanish by Anthony Seidman. 

Read the poems in Spanish here. /

 

Durability of Materials

 

L’Art est long et le Temps est court.

—Charles Baudelaire

 

The stone was here

before my birth, before

the birth of my father

and his father, my grandfather

and ten generations preceding,

and all the living beings

that people this planet

until this closing moment.

 

I can only kneel,

venerate the moisture

growing stronger as I sniff

its odor: a chunk of forest,

that ancient moisture

emanating from caves

sunken deep in time.

 

We will depart

                         and the stone

will remain in the plaza, erect,

atop the pile of its own bones

which do not crumble

with haste

                  unlike our

body parts.

 

Consistence of the world:

regard the mute corrosion

of flesh, so unlike the solidity

of millennia-laden textures; look,

the wasting envelopment,

the brittle bones sustaining

a tattered coat;

the stem which we ultimately are,

unlike the quarry or basalt

chilled by the alchemy of centuries.

 

Man is not older than stone,

nor does he reach as far

                                       or outlive

what he has erected with his living pulse.

 

He endures less than his creations.

 

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