Drinking Song - Silvia Curbelo
In every half-filled glass a river
begging to be named, rain on a leaf,
a snowdrift. What we long for
precedes us. What we've lost trails behind, casting a long shadow. Tonight
the music's sad, one man's outrageous loneliness detonated into arpeggios of relief. The way
someone once cupped someone's face in their hands, and the world that comes after. Everything
can be pared down to gravity or need. If the soul soars with longing the heart plunges headfirst
into what's left, believing there's a pure want to fall through. What we drink to
in the end is loss, the space around it, the opposite of thirst, its shadow.
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Daily Bread - Barbara Kingsolver
For Steven
The clink of tin cups in the kitchen rouses my ears. I close my book, hold my place with a fingertip while I listen: to the measuring cups, little quarrels of half against quarter, then the sifted hush of the flour. There will be kneading, there will be punching down, and rising and rising again, the press of increase constrained by the small square box in the oven, the immutable passage of time, and finally a home and a hunger filled with fragrant gold. I return to my reading, but first I thank the kitchen gods for what marriage is: throughout this immutable passage, these square impossible constraints, these petty clinkings of half against quarter, and oh this needing, oh this falling and this rising, I am blessed with a husband who makes bread
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Face through the Glass (An Old Man Gazes) - Vicente Aleixandre
Either late or soon or never. But here through the glass the face insists. Beside some natural flowers the flower itself appears in the form of colour, cheek, rose. Through the glass the rose is always a rose. But it has no scent. Distant youth is itself. But here it is not heard.
Only light passess through the virgin glass.
O tarde o pronto o nunca.
Pero ahí tras el cristal el rostro insiste. Junto a unas flores naturales la misma flor se muestra en forma de color, mejilla, rosa. Tras el cristal la rosa es siempre rosa. Pero no huele. La juventud distante es ella misma. Pero aquí no se oye.
Sólo la luz traspasa el cristal virgen.
Rostro tras el cristal (Mirada del viejo)
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